Nº1
He returns to his equals.
Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men
By Jean Jacques Rousseau
Citizen of Geneva
“What is natural has to be considered in what is good according to nature, not in what is corrupt.” Aristotle. Politics I.2
Epistle Dedicatory
To the Republic of Geneva
Magnificent, Most Honored, and Sovereign Lords,
[1] Convinced that only the virtuous Citizen may fittingly present to his Fatherland honors it may acknowledge, I have worked for the past thirty years to deserve to offer you some public homage; and this happy occasion making up in part for what my efforts have not been able to do, I believed I might here be permitted to heed the zeal that animates me more than right that should authorize me. Having had the good fortune to be born among you, how could I meditate about the equality nature established among men and the inequality they have instituted, without giving thought to the profound wisdom with which both, happily combined in this State, concur in the manner most closely approximating natural law and most favorable to society, to the preservation of public order and to the happiness of private individuals? In looking for the best maxims good sense might dictate regarding the constitution of a government, I was so struck to see them all implemented in yours that, even if I had not been born within your walls, I would have believed myself unable to refrain from offering this picture of human society to the one People that seems to me to possess its greatest advantages and to have best forestalled its abuses.
[2] If I had had to choose where to be born, I would have chosen a society of a size limited to the range of human faculties, that is to say to the possibility of being well governed, and where, everyone being equal to his task, no one would have been compelled to commit to others the functions with which he was himself charged: a State where, since all individuals know one another, neither the shady stratagems of vice nor the modesty of virtue could have escaped the Public’s gaze and judgment, and where this gentle habit of seeing and knowing one another would have made the love of the Fatherland a love of the Citizens rather than of the land.
[3] I would have wished to be born in a country where the Sovereign and the people could have but one and the same interest, so that all the motions of the machine might always tend only to the common happiness; since this cannot be unless the People and the Sovereign are one and the same person, it follows that I should have wished to be born under a democratic government wisely tempered.
[4] I would have wished to live and die free, that is to say so far subject to the laws that neither I nor anyone else could shake off their honorable yoke; the salutary and gentle yoke which the proudest heads bear with all the more docility as they are made to bear none other.
[5] I would have wished, then, that no one inside the State could have declared himself to be above the law, and No one outside it could have imposed any [law] which the State was obliged to recognize. For, regardless of how a government is constituted, if a single person in it is not subject to the law, all the others are necessarily at his discretion (I); and if there is one national Chief, and another foreign Chief, then regardless of the division of authority they may establish, it is impossible for both to be well obeyed and the State well governed.
[6] I would not have wished to live in a newly established Republic, regardless of how good its laws might be, for fear that, if the government were perhaps constituted differently than it should have been under the circumstances, either by being ill-suited to the new Citizens or the Citizens to the new government, the State might be liable to be overthrown and destroyed almost from birth. For freedom is like the solid and hearty foods or the full-bodied wines fit to feed and fortify robust temperaments used to them, but that overwhelm, ruin and intoxicate weak and delicate ones that are not up to them. Once Peoples are accustomed to Masters, they can no longer do without them. If they attempt to shake off the yoke, they only move further away from freedom because, since they mistake unbridled license for freedom, which is its very opposite, their revolutions almost always deliver them up to seducers who only make their chains heavier. Even the Roman People, that model of all free Peoples, could not govern itself on emerging from the Tarquins’ oppression. Degraded by the slavery and the ignominious labors the Tarquins had imposed on it, it was at first but a stupid Populace that had to be handled with care and governed with the utmost wisdom; so that these souls, enervated, or rather numbed under the tyranny, as they little by little grew accustomed to breathe the salutary air of freedom, might gradually acquire that severity of morals and that proud courage that eventually made of them the most respectable of all Peoples. I would, then, have sought out as my Fatherland a happy and quiet Republic of an antiquity lost, as it were, in the night of the ages; that had been subject only to such attacks as are apt to stimulate and to strengthen its inhabitants’ courage and love of Fatherland, and whose Citizens, accustomed by long experience to a wise independence, not only were free, but were worthy of being so.
[7] I would have wished to choose for myself a Fatherland diverted from the fierce love of Conquest by a fortunate powerlessness, and protected by an even more fortunate location from the fear of itself becoming the Conquest of some other State: A free City, situated in the midst of a number of Peoples none of which had any interest in invading it, but each of which had an interest in preventing the others from invading it: In a word, a Republic which did not tempt the ambition of its neighbors, and might reasonably count on their help in case of need. It follows that, being so fortunately situated, it would have had nothing to fear but from itself alone; and that if its Citizens had military training, it would have been more in order to keep alive in them that martial spirit and proud courage that so becomes freedom and maintains the taste for it, than from the necessity of providing for their own defense.
[8] I would have sought out a Country where the right of legislation was common to all Citizens; for who could know better than they the conditions under which it suits them to live together in one society? But I would not have approved of Plebiscites like those of the Romans, where the Chiefs of the State and those most interested in its preservation were excluded from the deliberations on which its security often depended, and where, by an absurd inconsistency, the Magistrates were deprived of rights enjoyed by ordinary Citizens.
[9] On the contrary, in order to forestall the self-seeking and ill-conceived projects and the dangerous innovations that finally ruined the Athenians, I would have wished that not everyone have the power to propose new Laws according to his fancy; that this right belong to the Magistrates alone; even that they exercise it so circumspectly that the People, for its part, be so wary to grant its consent to these Laws, and that their promulgation require so much solemnity that, before the constitution became unstable, there had been time to realize that it is above all the great antiquity of the Laws that renders them sacred and venerable, that the People soon scorn those they see change daily, and that, by getting used to neglecting ancient ways on the pretext of doing better, great evils are often introduced to correct lesser ones.
[10] I would above all have fled as necessarily ill-governed a Republic where the People, believing it could do without its Magistrates or leave them no more than a precarious authority, had imprudently retained the administration of Civil affairs and the execution of its own Laws in its own hands; such must have been the rude constitution of the first governments arising immediately from the state of Nature, and it also was one of the Vices that ruined the Republic of Athens.
[11] Rather, I would have chosen one where private persons, content to ratify the Laws and decide the most important public business in a Body and on the recommendation of the Chiefs, established respected tribunals, carefully distinguished their various functions, yearly elected the most capable and the most upright among their Fellow-Citizens to administer Justice and govern the State; and where the Virtue of the Magistrates thus bearing witness to the wisdom of the People, each would do the other honor. So that if ever fatal misunderstandings were to disturb the public harmony, even those times of blindness and errors might be marked by evidence of moderation, mutual esteem, and a shared respect for the Laws; harbingers and guarantees of a sincere and everlasting reconciliation.
[12] Such, magnificent, most honored and sovereign lords, are the advantages I would have sought in the Fatherland I would have chosen. If, to these, providence had added a lovely location, a temperate Climate, a fertile soil, and the most delightful vistas under Heaven, I should only have wished, in order to complete my happiness, to enjoy all of these goods in the bosom of this happy Fatherland, living peacefully in the sweet society of my Fellow-Citizens, practicing toward them, and at their example, humanity, friendship, and all the virtues, and leaving behind the honorable memory of a good man and an honest and virtuous Patriot.
[13] If, less happy or too late grown wise, I saw myself reduced to ending a lame and languishing career in other Climes, in vain regretting the quiet and the Peace of which a youthful want of prudence would have deprived me; I would at least have fostered in my soul the very sentiments that I could not exercise in my country, and, imbued with tender and selfless affection for my distant Fellow-Citizens, I would have addressed to them from the bottom of my heart approximately the following discourse.
[14] My dear Fellow-Citizens or rather my brothers, since ties of blood as well as the Laws unite almost all of us, it pleases me that I cannot think of you without at the same time thinking of all the goods you enjoy and of which perhaps none of you feels the value better than I who have lost them. The more I reflect on your Political and Civil situation, the less can I imagine that the nature of human things could admit of a better. In all other Governments, when it is a question of providing for the greatest good of the State, everything is always restricted to ideas for projects, and at most to mere possibilities. As for yourselves, your happiness is complete, you have only to enjoy it; and all you need in order to become perfectly happy is to know how to be content with being so. Your Sovereignty, acquired or recovered at sword’s point and maintained for two centuries by dint of valor and wisdom, is at last fully and universally recognized. Honorable Treaties fix your boundaries, insure your rights, and confirm your security. Your constitution is excellent, dictated by the most sublime reason and guaranteed by friendly and respectable Powers; your State enjoys tranquility, you have neither wars nor conquerors to fear; you have no other masters than wise laws, made by yourselves, administered by upright Magistrates of your own choosing; you are neither so rich as to become enervated by softness and to lose the taste for true happiness and solid virtues in vain delights, nor so poor as to need more foreign assistance than your industry provides; and it costs you almost nothing to preserve the precious freedom which large Nations can maintain only by means of exorbitant Taxes.
[15] May a Republic so wisely and so happily constituted last forever, both for its Citizens’ happiness, and as an example to all Peoples! This is the only wish it remains for you to make, and the only care it remains for you to take. Henceforth it is up to yourselves alone not, indeed, to provide for your happiness, your Ancestors have spared you that trouble, but to make it long-lasting by the wisdom of using it well. Your preservation depends on your everlasting union, your obedience to the laws, your respect for their Ministers. If there remains among you the least germ of bitterness or mistrust, hasten to destroy it as a fatal leaven that would sooner or later bring about your miseries and the State’s ruin: I implore all of you to return to the depths of your Heart and to consult the secret voice of your conscience: Does anyone of you know anywhere in the universe a more upright, more enlightened, or more respectable Body than your Magistrature? Do not all of its members offer you an example of moderation, of simplicity of morals, of respect for the laws, and of the most sincere reconciliation? then grant without reservations to these wise Chiefs the salutary trust which reason owes to virtue; remember that you have chosen them, that they justify your choice, and that the honors owed to those whom you have made dignitaries necessarily redound on yourselves. None of you is so unenlightened as not to know that where the laws lose their vigor and its defenders their authority there can be neither security nor freedom for anyone. What else, then, is at issue between you, than that you do wholeheartedly and with justified confidence what you would in any event have to do out of true interest, duty, and reason? May a guilty and fatal indifference to the preservation of the constitution never cause you to neglect in times of need the wise opinions of the most enlightened and zealous among you: Rather, may equity, moderation, and the most respectful firmness continue to regulate all your undertakings and through you exhibit to the entire universe the example of a proud and modest People as jealous of its glory as of its freedom. Above all, and this will be my last Advice, beware of ever heeding sinister interpretations and venomous discourses, the secret motives of which are often more dangerous than are the actions they are about. An entire household is awake and on the lookout at the first calls of a good and loyal Guardian who barks only when Thieves draw near; but people hate the importuning of the noisy animals that continually disturb the public peace, and their constant and misplaced warnings are not heeded even in time of need.
[16] And you, magnificent and most honored lords, you worthy and respectable Magistrates of a free People; allow me to offer my homage and respects to you in particular. If there is in the world a rank suited to confer distinction on those who occupy it, it is without a doubt the rank bestowed by talents and virtue, the rank of which you have proved yourselves worthy, and to which your Fellow-Citizens have raised you. Their own merit adds further luster to yours, and I find that for having been chosen to govern them by men capable of governing others, you are as much superior to all other Magistrates as a free People, and particularly the free people you have the honor of leading, is, by its enlightenment and reason, superior to the populace of other States.
[17] Allow me to cite an example of which there should be better records, and which will always be present to my Heart. I never recall without the sweetest emotion the memory of the virtuous Citizen to whom I owe my life, and who often throughout my childhood impressed on me the respect due you. I see him still, living by the work of his hands, and nourishing his soul with the most sublime Truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius before him amidst the tools of his trade. I see at his side a beloved son receiving with too little profit the tender teachings of the best of Fathers. But if the excesses of a foolish youth caused me to forget such wise lessons for a time, I have the happiness of at last experiencing that, whatever may be one’s inclination to vice, an education in which the heart has a share is unlikely to be lost forever.
[18] Such are, magnificent and most honored lords, the Citizens and even the mere residents born in the State you govern; such are the educated and sensible men about whom they have such low and false ideas in other Nations, where they are called Workers and the People. My Father, I gladly admit it, was not outstanding among his fellow-citizens; he was but what they all are, and, such as he was, there is no Country where his society would not have been sought after, cultivated, and even profitably so, by the most honest people. It is not for me, and thank Heaven it is not necessary, to tell you how much regard men of such mettle can expect from you, your equals by education as well as by the rights of nature and of birth; your inferiors by their own will, by the preference which they owe to your merit, which they have granted to it, and for which you, in turn, owe them a kind of gratitude. I learn with lively satisfaction how much you, in your dealings with them, temper the gravity behooving the ministers of the Laws with gentleness and condescension; how much you reciprocate in esteem and attentions what they owe you by way of obedience and respect; conduct full of justice and of wisdom that is appropriate for putting increasingly far behind the memory of the unhappy events which must be forgotten if they are never to recur: conduct all the more judicious as this equitable and generous People makes its duty a pleasure, as it naturally loves to honor you, and as those who are most intent on upholding their rights are the ones who are most inclined to respect yours.
[19] It should not be surprising that the Chiefs of a Civil Society love its glory and happiness, but it is altogether too surprising for men’s peace of mind that those who look upon themselves as the Magistrates, or rather as the masters of a Fatherland more holy and more sublime, should exhibit any love for the earthly Fatherland that sustains them. How pleased I am to be able to make such a rare exception in our favor, and to rank among our best citizens those zealous trustees of the sacred dogmas authorized by the laws, those venerable Pastors of souls whose lively and sweet eloquence all the better conveys the maxims of the Gospel into men’s Hearts because they are themselves always the first to practice them! Everybody knows how successfully the great art of the Pulpit is cultivated in Geneva; But since they are all too accustomed to see things said one way and done another, few People know the extent to which the spirit of Christianity, sanctity of morals, severity toward oneself and gentleness toward others prevail in the Body of our Ministers. Perhaps only the City of Geneva can offer the edifying example of such a perfect union between a Society of Theologians and of Men of Letters. It is in large measure on their acknowledged wisdom and moderation, it is on their zeal for the State’s prosperity that I base the hope for its eternal tranquility; and I note with a mixture of pleasure, surprise, and respect how much they abhor the frightful maxims of those holy and barbarous men of whom History provides more than one example and who, in order to uphold the supposed rights of God, that is to say their own interest, were all the less sparing of human blood as they flattered themselves that their own would always be respected.
[20] Could I forget the precious half of the Republic that makes for the other’s happiness, and whose gentleness and wisdom preserve its peace and good morals? Amiable and virtuous Citizen-women, it will always be the lot of your sex to govern ours. How fortunate when your chaste power, exercised solely in conjugal union, makes itself felt only for the State’s glory and the public happiness: This is how women commanded in Sparta, and this is how you deserve to command in Geneva. What man would be so barbarous as to resist the voice of honor and reason from the mouth of a tender wife; and who would not despise vain luxury upon seeing your simple and modest attire which, by the radiance it owes to you, seems to complement beauty most? It is up to you always to preserve the love of the laws in the State, and Concord among the Citizens, by your amiable and innocent dominion and your winning wit; by happy marriages to reunite divided families; and above all, by the persuasive gentleness of your lessons and the modest graciousness of your conversation, to correct the misconceptions our young Men acquire in other countries from which, instead of the many useful things that could profit them, they only bring back, together with a childish tone and ridiculous airs adopted among lost women, an admiration for I know not what supposed grandeurs, the frivolous compensations for servitude, that will never be worth as much as august freedom. Therefore always be what you are, the chaste guardians of morals and the gentle bonds of peace, and continue at every opportunity to assert the rights of the Heart and of Nature on behalf of duty and of virtue.
[21] I flatter myself that the event will not prove me wrong, when I base the hope for the Citizens’ common happiness and the Republic’s glory on such guarantors. I admit that, for all of these advantages, it will not shine with the brilliance that dazzles most eyes, and a childish and fatal taste for which is the deadliest enemy of happiness and of freedom. Let dissolute youths go elsewhere in search of easy pleasures and lasting remorse: Let supposed men of taste admire elsewhere the grandeur of Palaces, the beauty of carriages, the sumptuous furnishings, the pomp of spectacles, and all the refinements of softness and luxury. In Geneva will be found only men, yet such a spectacle has its own value, and those who will seek it out will certainly be worth as much as those who admire the rest.
[22] Deign, magnificent, most honored and sovereign lords, all of you, to accept, with equal kindness, the respectful testimonies of the interest I take in your common prosperity. If I had the misfortune of being guilty of some indiscreet transport in this lively outpouring of my Heart, I beseech you to pardon it as due to the tender affection of a true Patriot, and the ardent and legitimate zeal of a man who envisions no greater happiness for himself than that of seeing all of you happy.
I am with the deepest respect
magnificent, most honored and sovereign lords,
Your most humble and most obedient
servant and Fellow-Citizen
Jean Jacques Rousseau
At Chambéry, 12 June 1754
Preface
[1] The most useful and the least advanced of all human knowledge seems to me to be that of man (II), and I dare say that the inscription on the Temple at Delphi alone contained a more important and more difficult Precept than all the big Books of the Moralists. I therefore consider the subject of this Discourse to be one of the most interesting questions Philosophy might raise, and unfortunately for us one of the thorniest Philosophers might have to resolve: For how can the source of inequality among men be known unless one begins by knowing men themselves? and how will man ever succeed in seeing himself as Nature formed him, through all the changes which the succession of times and of things must have wrought in his original constitution, and in disentangling what he owes to his own stock from what circumstances and his progress have added to or changed in his primitive State? like the statue of Glaucus which time, sea, and storms had so disfigured that it resembled less a God than a ferocious Beast, the human soul adulterated in the lap of society by a thousand forever recurring causes, by the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and errors, by the changes that have taken place in the constitution of Bodies, and by the continual impact of the passions, has, so to speak, changed in appearance to the point of being almost unrecognizable; and instead of a being always acting on certain and unvarying Principles, instead of the Celestial and majestic simplicity its Author imprinted on it, all one still finds in it is the deformed contrast of passion that believes it reasons and the understanding in delirium.
[2] What is more cruel still, is that, since every progress of the human Species removes it ever farther from its primitive state, the more new knowledge we accumulate, the more do we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all, and that in a sense it is by dint of studying man that we have made it impossible for us to know him.
[3] It is easy to see that it is in these successive changes of man’s constitution that one must seek the first origin of the differences that distinguish men who, by common consent, are naturally as equal among themselves as were the animals of every species before various Physical causes introduced in some of them the varieties we notice in them. Indeed, it is not conceivable that these first changes, however they may have come about, altered all the Individuals of the species at once and in the same way; rather, while some were perfected or deteriorated and acquired various good or bad qualities that were not inherent in their Nature, the others remained in their original state for a longer time; and such was, among men, the first source of inequality, which it is easier to establish thus in general, than it is to assign its genuine causes with precision.
[4] Let my Readers therefore not imagine that I dare flatter myself with having seen what seems to me so difficult to see. I have initiated some arguments; I have hazarded some conjectures, less in the hope of resolving the question than with the intention of elucidating it and reducing it to its genuine state. Others will easily be able to go farther along the same road, though it will not be easy for anyone to reach the end. For it is no light undertaking to disentangle what is original from what is artificial in man’s present Nature, and to know accurately a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never did exist, which probably never will exist, and about which it is nevertheless necessary to have exact Notions in order to judge our present state adequately. Whoever might undertake to ascertain exactly the precautions required to make solid observations on this subject would need even more Philosophy than one might suspect; and a good solution to the following Problem does not seem to me unworthy of the Aristotles and the Plinys of our century: What experiments would be needed in order to get to know natural man; and by what means can these experiments be performed within society? Far from undertaking to solve this Problem, I believe that I have meditated on the Subject sufficiently to dare answer from the outset that the greatest Philosophers will not be too good to conduct these experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns to perform them; a collaboration which it is scarcely reasonable to expect, especially in conjunction with the sustained or rather the successive enlightenment and goodwill needed by both parties in order to succeed.
[5] Yet these investigations so difficult to carry out, and to which so little thought has so far been devoted, are the only means we have left to resolve a host of difficulties that deprive us of the knowledge of the real foundations of human society. It is this ignorance of the nature of man that casts such uncertainty and obscurity on the genuine definition of natural right: for the idea of right, says M. Burlamaqui, and still more that of natural right, are manifestly ideas relative to the Nature of man. Hence, he goes on, it is from this very Nature of man, from his constitution and his state, that the principles of this science have to be deduced.
[6] It is not without surprise and scandal that one notes how little agreement prevails about this important matter among the various Authors who have dealt with it. Among the most serious Writers, scarcely two can be found who are of the same opinion on this point. To say nothing of the Ancient Philosophers who seem deliberately to have set out to contradict one another on the most fundamental principles, the Roman Jurists indiscriminately subject man and all other animals to the same natural Law, because they consider under this name the Law which Nature imposes upon itself, rather than that which it prescribes; or rather, because of the particular sense in which these Jurists understand the word Law, which they seem on this occasion to have taken only for the expression of the general relations established by nature among all animate beings for their common preservation. The Moderns, since they allow the name of Law only for a rule prescribed to a moral being, that is to say to a being that is intelligent, free, and considered in its relations with other beings, restrict the province of natural Law to the only animal endowed with reason, that is to say to man; but while each one of them defines this Law in his own fashion, all of them base it on such metaphysical principles that even among us there are very few people capable of understanding these principles, let alone of discovering them on their own. So that all the definitions by these learned men, which in every other respect forever contradict one another, agree only in this, that it is impossible to understand the Law of Nature and hence to obey it without being a very great reasoner and a profound Metaphysician. Which precisely means that in order to establish society men must have employed an enlightenment which develops only with much difficulty and among very few people within society itself.
[7] Knowing Nature so little, and agreeing so poorly about the meaning of the word Law, it would be quite difficult to concur about a good definition of natural Law. Indeed, all those that are found in Books, besides not being uniform, suffer from the further defect of being derived from a range of Knowledge which men do not naturally have, and from advantages the idea of which they can conceive of only once they have left the state of Nature. One begins by looking for the rules about which it would be appropriate for men to agree among themselves for the sake of the common utility; and then gives the name natural Law to the collection of these rules, with no further proof than the good which, in one’s view, would result from universal compliance with them. That is certainly a very convenient way of framing definitions, and of explaining the nature of things by almost arbitrary conformities.
[8] But so long as we do not know natural man, we will in vain try to ascertain either the Law which he has received or that which best suits his constitution. All we can very clearly see about this Law is not only that for it to be law the will of him whom it obligates must be able to submit to it knowingly; But also that for it to be natural it must speak immediately with the voice of Nature.
[9] Hence disregarding all the scientific books that only teach us to see men as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and simplest operations of the human Soul, I believe I perceive in it two principles prior to reason, of which one interests us intensely in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient Being, and especially any being like ourselves, perish or suffer. It is from the cooperation and the combination our mind is capable of making between these two Principles, without it being necessary to introduce into it that of sociability, that all the rules of natural right seem to me to flow; rules which reason is subsequently forced to reestablish on other foundations, when by its successive developments it has succeeded in stifling Nature.
[10] This way one is not obliged to make a Philosopher of man before making a man of him; his duties toward others are not dictated to him exclusively by the belated lessons of Wisdom; and as long as he does not resist the internal impulsion of commiseration, he will never harm another human being or even any sentient being, except in the legitimate case when, his preservation being involved, he is obliged to give himself preference. By this means the ancient disputes about whether animals participate in the natural Law are also brought to an end: For it is clear that, since they are deprived of enlightenment and of freedom, they cannot recognize that Law; but since they in some measure partake in our nature through the sentience with which they are endowed, it will be concluded that they must also participate in natural right, and that man is subject to some kind of duties toward them. Indeed, it would seem that if I am obliged not to harm another being like myself, this is so less because it is a rational being than because it is a sentient being; a quality which, since it is common to beast and man, must at least give the beast the right not to be needlessly mistreated by man.
[11] This same study of original man, of his true needs, and of the fundamental principles of his duties is also the only effective means available to dispel the host of difficulties that arise regarding the origin of moral inequality, the true foundations of the Body politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and a thousand similar questions, as important as they are poorly elucidated.
[12] Human society viewed with a calm and disinterested eye seems at first to exhibit only the violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak; the mind revolts at the harshness of the first; one is inclined to deplore the blindness of the others; and since nothing is less stable among men than those external relationships that are more often the product of chance than of wisdom, and that are called weakness or power, wealth or poverty, human establishments seem at first glance to be founded on piles of Quicksand; it is only by examining them closely, only after setting aside the dust and sand that surround the Edifice, that one perceives the unshakable base on which it is raised, and learns to respect its foundations. Now, without the serious study of man, of his natural faculties, and of their successive developments, one will never succeed in drawing these distinctions and in separating what, in the present constitution of things, divine will has done from what human art has pretended to do. The Political and moral investigations occasioned by the important question I am examining are therefore in every way useful, and the hypothetical history of governments is in all respects an instructive lesson for man. By considering what we would have become, abandoned to ourselves, we must learn to bless him whose beneficent hand, correcting our institutions and grounding them unshakably, forestalled the disorders that would have resulted from them, and caused our happiness to be born from the very means that seemed bound to complete our misery.
Learn what the god ordered you to be,
And what your place is in the human world.
Notice about the Notes
I have added some notes to this work after my lazy practice of working in fits and starts. These notes sometimes stray so wide of the subject that they are not good to read together with the text. I therefore cast them to the end of the Discourse, in which I tried my best to follow the straightest road. Those who will have the courage to start over again can amuse themselves the second time by beating the bushes, and trying to peruse the notes; there will be little harm in the others’ not reading them at all.
Question
Proposed by the Academy of Dijon
What is the origin of inequality among men, and whether it is authorized by the natural Law.
Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men
[1] It is of man that I am to speak, and the question I examine tells me that I shall be speaking to men, for one does not propose such questions if one is afraid of honoring the truth. I shall therefore confidently uphold the cause of humanity before the wise men who invite me to do so, and I shall not be dissatisfied with myself if I prove worthy of my subject and my judges.
[2] I conceive of two sorts of inequality in the human Species; one which I call natural or Physical, because it is established by Nature, and which consists in the differences in age, health, strengths of Body, and qualities of Mind or of Soul; The other, which may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a sort of convention, and is established, or at least authorized by Men’s consent. It consists in the different Privileges that some enjoy to the prejudice of the others, such as being more wealthy, more honored, more Powerful than they, or even to get themselves obeyed by them.
[3] It makes no sense to ask what the source of Natural inequality is, because the answer would consist in the mere definition of the word: Still less does it make sense to inquire whether there might not be some essential connection between the two inequalities; for that would be to ask in different terms whether those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and whether strength of Body or of Mind, wisdom or virtue, are always found in the same individuals, in proportion to their Power, or their Wealth: A question it may perhaps be good for Slaves to debate within hearing of their Masters, but not befitting rational and free Men who seek the truth.
[4] What, then, precisely is at issue in this Discourse? To mark, in the progress of things, the moment when, Right replacing Violence, Nature was subjected to Law; to explain by what chain of wonders the strong could resolve to serve the weak, and the People to purchase an idea of repose at the price of real felicity.
[5] The Philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of going back as far as the state of Nature, but none of them has reached it. Some have not hesitated to ascribe to Man in that state the notion of the Just and the Unjust, without bothering to show that he had to have this notion, or even that it would have been useful to him; Others have spoken of everyone’s Natural Right to keep what belongs to him, without explaining what they understood by belong; Others still, after first granting to the stronger authority over the weaker, had Government arise straightaway, without giving thought to the time that must have elapsed before the language of authority and of government could have meaning for Men: Finally, all of them, continually speaking of need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride transferred to the state of Nature ideas they had taken from society; They spoke of Savage Man and depicted Civil man. It did not even enter the mind of most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of Nature had existed whereas it is evident, from reading the Holy Scriptures, that the first Man having received some lights and Precepts immediately from God was not himself in that state, and that, if the Writings of Moses are granted the credence owed them by every Christian Philosopher, it has to be denied that, even before the Flood, Men were ever in the pure state of Nature, unless they relapsed into it by some extraordinary Occurrence: a Paradox most awkward to defend, and altogether impossible to prove.
[6] Let us therefore begin by setting aside all the facts, for they do not affect the question. The Inquiries that may be pursued regarding this Subject ought not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings; better suited to elucidate the Nature of things than to show their genuine origin, and comparable to those our Physicists daily make regarding the formation of the World. Religion commands us to believe that since God himself drew Men out of the state of Nature immediately after the creation, they are unequal because he wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to form conjectures based solely on the nature of man and of the Beings around him, about what Mankind might have become if it had remained abandoned to itself. This is what I am asked, and what I propose to examine in this Discourse. Since my subject concerns man in general, I shall try to speak in a language suited to all Nations, or rather, forgetting times and Places, in order to think only about the Men to whom I am speaking, I shall suppose myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating the Lessons of my Masters, with the likes of Plato and of Xenocrates as my Judges, and Mankind as my Audience.
[7] O Man, whatever Land you may be from, whatever may be your opinions, listen; Here is your history such as I believed I read it, not in the Books by your kind, who are liars, but in Nature, which never lies. Everything that will have come from it, will be true: Nothing will be false but what I will unintentionally have introduced of my own. The times of which I will speak are very remote: How much you have changed from what you were! It is, so to speak, the life of your species that I will describe to you in terms of the qualities you received, which your education and your habits could deprave, but which they could not destroy. There is, I sense, an age at which the individual human being would want to stop; You will look for the age at which you would wish your Species had stopped. Discontented with your present state for reasons that herald even greater discontents for your unhappy Posterity, you might perhaps wish to be able to go backward; And this sentiment must serve as the Praise of your earliest forbears, the criticism of your contemporaries, and the dread of those who will have the misfortune to live after you.
Part I.
[1] However important it may be, in order to judge soundly regarding Man’s natural state, to consider him from his origin, and to examine him, so to speak, in the first Embryo of the species, I shall not follow his organization through its successive developments: I shall not pause to search in the animal System what he may have been at the beginning if he was eventually to become what he now is; I shall not examine whether, as Aristotle thinks, his elongated nails were at first hooked claws; whether he was as hairy as a bear and whether, walking on all fours, (III) his gaze directed to the ground, and confined to a horizon of a few paces, determined both the character and the limits of his ideas. I could form only vague and almost imaginary conjectures on this subject: Comparative Anatomy has as yet made too little progress, the observations of Naturalists are as yet too uncertain to permit establishing the basis for solid reasoning on such foundations; so that, without resorting to the supernatural knowledge we have on this point, and without taking into account the changes that must have occurred in man’s internal and the external conformation as he gradually put his limbs to new uses and took up new foods, I shall assume him always conformed as I see him today, walking on two feet, using his hands as we do ours, directing his gaze over the whole of Nature, and with his eyes surveying the vast expanse of Heaven.
[2] By stripping this Being, so constituted, of all the supernatural gifts he may have received, and of all the artificial faculties he could only have acquired by prolonged progress; by considering him, in a word, such as he must have issued from the hands of Nature, I see an animal less strong than some, less agile than others, but, all things considered, the most advantageously organized of all: I see him sating his hunger beneath an oak, slaking his thirst at the first Stream, finding his bed at the foot of the same tree that provided his meal, and with that his needs are satisfied.
[3] The Earth, abandoned to its natural fertility (IV), and covered by immense forests which no Axe ever mutilated, at every step offers Storage and shelter to the animals of every species. Men, dispersed among them, observe, imitate their industry, and so raise themselves to the level of the Beasts’ instinct, with this advantage that each species has but its own instinct, while man perhaps having none that belongs to him, appropriates them all, feeds indifferently on most of the various foods (V) which the other animals divide among themselves, and as a result finds his subsistence more easily than can any one of them.
[4] Accustomed from childhood to the inclemencies of the weather and the rigor of the seasons, hardened to fatigue, and forced to defend naked and unarmed their life and their Prey against the other ferocious Beasts or to escape them by running, Men develop a robust and almost unalterable temperament; The Children, since they come into the world with their Fathers’ excellent constitution and strengthen it by the same activities that produced it, thus acquire all the vigor of which the human species is capable. Nature deals with them exactly as the Law of Sparta did with the Children of Citizens; It makes those who have a good constitution strong and robust, and causes all the others to perish; differing in this from our societies, where the State kills Children indiscriminately before their birth by making them a burden to their Fathers.
[5] Since his body is the only tool which savage man knows, he puts it to various uses of which our bodies are incapable for want of practice, and it is our industry that deprives us of the strength and the agility which necessity obliges him to acquire. If he had had an axe, could his wrist have cracked such solid branches? If he had had a sling, could he have thrown a stone as hard by hand? If he had had a ladder, could he have climbed a tree as nimbly? If he had had a Horse, could he have run as fast? Give civilized man [136] the time to *gather all his machines around him, there can be no doubt that he will easily overcome Savage man; but if you want to see an even more unequal contest, have them confront each other naked and unarmed, and you will soon recognize the advantage of constantly having all one’s strengths at one’s disposal, of being ever ready for any eventuality and of, so to speak, always carrying all of oneself along with one (VI).
[6] Hobbes contends that man is naturally intrepid, and seeks only to attack, and to fight. An illustrious Philosopher thinks, on the contrary, and Cumberland and Pufendorf also maintain, that nothing is as timid as man in the state of Nature, and that he is forever trembling, and ready to flee at the least noise that strikes him, at the least movement he notices. This may be so with regard to objects he does not know, and I do not doubt that he is frightened by every new Sight that presents itself to him, whenever he cannot distinguish between the Physical good or evil he can expect from it, nor compare his strength with the dangers he has to face; circumstances that are rare in the state of Nature, where everything proceeds in such a uniform fashion, and where the face of the Earth is not subject to the sudden and constant changes caused in it by the passions and the inconstancy of Peoples assembled. But Savage man, living dispersed amongst the animals, and early finding himself in the position of having to measure himself against them, soon makes the comparison and, feeling that he surpasses them in skill more than they do him in strength, learns to fear them no more. Pit a bear or a wolf against a sturdy, agile, courageous Savage, as they all are, armed with stones, and a good stick, and you will see that the danger will at the very least be reciprocal, and that after several such experiences, ferocious Beasts, disinclined as they are to attack one another, will not readily attack man, whom they will have found to be just as ferocious as themselves. As for the animals that really do have more strength than he has skill, he is in the same position with regard to them as are the other weaker species which nonetheless continue to subsist; with this advantage on man’s side that, since he runs just as well as they, and can find almost certain refuge in trees, he has the initiative in any encounter, as well as the choice of fleeing or fighting. Let us add that it does not seem that any animal naturally makes war on man, except in the case of self-defense or of extreme hunger, or that any bears him those violent antipathies that seem to announce that one species is destined by Nature to serve as fodder for the other
[7] These are undoubtedly the reasons why Negroes and Savages worry so little about the ferocious beasts they might meet up with in the woods. In this respect the Caribs of Venezuela, among others, live in the most profound security and without the slightest inconvenience. Although they are almost naked, says Françols Correal, they do not hesitate to take their chances in the woods, armed only with bow and arrow; yet nobody has ever heard of a single one of them being devoured by beasts.
[8] Other, more formidable enemies against which man has not the same means of defense are the natural infirmities, childhood, old age, and illnesses of every kind: Melancholy signs of our weakness, of which the first two are common to all animals, and the last belongs primarily to man living in Society. As regards Childhood, I even note that, since the Mother carries her child with her everywhere, she can feed it much more readily than can the female of a number of animals, forced as they are to wear themselves out going back and forth, one way to find their food, the other to suckle or feed their young. It is true that if the woman happens to perish, the child runs a considerable risk of perishing with her; but this danger is common to a hundred other species whose young are for a long time not in a condition to forage for themselves; and while Childhood lasts longer among us, life also does, so that everything remains more or less equal in this respect (VII); although there are other rules regarding the duration of the first period of life and the number of young, (VIII) which do not pertain to my Subject. Among Old people, who are not particularly active and perspire little, the need for food diminishes together with the capacity to provide for it; And since Savage life keeps gout and rheumatisms from them, and old age is the one of all ills which human assistance can least alleviate, they eventually expire without anyone’s noticing that they cease to be, and almost without their noticing it themselves.
[9] Regarding illnesses, I will not repeat the vain and false declamations against Medicine by most healthy people; but I will ask whether there is any solid evidence to conclude that in Countries where this art is most neglected man’s average life span is shorter than in those where it is cultivated with the greatest care; And how could this be unless we inflict upon ourselves more ills than Medicine can provide Remedies! The extreme inequality in ways of life, the excessive idleness of some, the excessive labors of others, the ease with which our appetites and our sensuality are aroused and satisfied, the excessively exotic dishes of the rich that fill them with astringent sauces and wrack them with indigestions, the bad food of the Poor, which most of the time they do not even have and the want of which leads them greedily to strain their stomachs when they get the chance, the late nights, the excesses of every kind, the immoderate transports of all the Passions, the fatigues and exhaustion of the Mind, the innumerable sorrows and pains that are experienced in every station and that perpetually gnaw away at men’s souls; Such are the fatal proofs that most of our ills are of our own making, and that we would have avoided almost all of them if we had retained the simple, uniform and solitary way of life prescribed to us by Nature. If it destined us to be healthy then, I almost dare assert, the state of reflection is a state against Nature, and the man who meditates is a depraved animal. When one considers the good constitution of Savages, at least of those we have not ruined with our strong liquors, when one realizes that they know almost no other illnesses than wounds and old age, one is strongly inclined to believe that the history of human diseases could easily be written by following that of civil Societies. Such at least is the opinion of Plato who, on the basis of certain Remedies used or approved by Podalirius and Machaon at the siege of Troy, judges that various diseases which these remedies should have brought on were at that time not yet known among men. And Celsus reports that dieting, which is nowadays so necessary, was only invented by Hippocrates.
[10] With so few sources of ills, man in the state of Nature has, then, little need for remedies, and even less for Doctors; in this respect as well, the human species is no worse off than are all the others, and one can easily find out from Hunters whether they come across many sick animals in their treks. They do find some with massive, very well-healed wounds, that had bones and even limbs broken and set by no other Surgeon than time, with no other regimen than their ordinary life, and that are no less perfectly healed for not having been tormented by incisions, poisoned by Drugs, or exhausted by fasts. In short, however useful well-administered medicine may be among us, it is in any event certain that while the sick Savage abandoned to himself alone has nothing to hope for but from Nature, in return he has nothing to fear but from his illness, which often makes his situation preferable to ours.
[11] Let us therefore beware of confusing Savage man with the men we have before our eyes. Nature treats all animals abandoned to its care with a partiality that seems to indicate how jealous it is of this right. The Horse, the Cat, the Bull, even the Ass are, most of them, larger in size, all of them have a sturdier constitution, greater vigor, force, and courage in the forests than in our houses; they lose half of these advantages when they are Domesticated, and it would seem that all our care to treat and to feed these animals well only succeeds to degenerate them. The same is true of man himself: As he becomes sociable and a Slave, he becomes weak, timorous, groveling, and his soft and effeminate way of life completes the enervation of both his strength and his courage. Let us add that the difference between one man and another in the Savage and in the Domesticated condition must be even greater than that between one beast and another; for since animal and man were treated alike by Nature, all the conveniences which man gives himself above and beyond those he gives the animals he tames are so many particular causes that lead him to degenerate more appreciably.
[12] To go naked, to be without a dwelling, and to be deprived of all the useless things we believe so necessary is, then, not such a great misfortune for these first men nor, above all, is it such a great obstacle to their preservation. While their skin is not very hairy, they do not need it to be in warm Countries, and in cold Countries they soon learn to appropriate the skins of the Beasts they have overcome; though they have only two feet for running, they have two arms to provide for their defense and for their needs; Their Children may walk late and with difficulty, but the Mothers carry them with ease: an advantage not enjoyed by the other species where the mother, when pursued, finds herself compelled to abandon her young or to adjust her pace to theirs. [There may be a few exceptions to this. For example that of the animal from the province of Nicaragua which resembles a Fox, has feet like a man’s hands and, according to Corréal, has a pouch under its belly into which the mother puts her young when she has to flee. This is probably the same animal which in Mexico is called Tlaquatzin, and to the female of which Laët attributes a similar pouch serving the same purpose.] Finally, unless one assumes the singular and fortuitous concatenations of circumstances of which I will speak in the sequel and that might very well never have occurred, it is for all intents and purposes clear that he who first made himself clothes or a Dwelling thereby provided himself with things that are not very necessary, since he had done without them until then, and since it is not evident why he could not have tolerated as a grown man a mode of life he had tolerated from childhood.
[13] Alone, idle, and always near danger, Savage man must like to sleep and be a light sleeper like the animals which, since they think little, sleep, so to speak, whenever they are not thinking: Self-preservation being almost his only care, his most active faculties must be those that primarily serve in attack and defense, either in order to overcome his prey or to guard against becoming another animal’s prey: By contrast, the organs that are perfected only by softness and sensuality must remain in a state of coarseness that precludes every kind of delicacy in him; and since his senses differ in this respect, his touch and taste will be extremely crude; his sight, hearing and smell most acute: Such is the animal state in general, and, according to Travelers’ reports, it is also that of most Savage Peoples. It is therefore not surprising that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope can sight Ships with the naked eye as far out on the high seas as the Dutch can with Telescopes, nor that the Savages of America track the Spaniards by smell just as well as the best Dogs might have done, nor that all these Barbarous Nations tolerate their nakedness without discomfort, whet their appetite with hot Peppers, and drink European Liquors like water.
[14] Until now I have considered only Physical Man; Let us now try to look at him from the Metaphysical and Moral side.
[15] I see in any animal nothing but an ingenious machine to which nature has given senses in order to wind itself up and, to a point, protect itself against everything that tends to destroy or to disturb it. I perceive precisely the same thing in the human machine, with this difference that Nature alone does everything in the operations of the Beast, whereas man contributes to his operations in his capacity as a free agent. The one chooses or rejects by instinct, the other by an act of freedom; as a result the Beast cannot deviate from the Rule prescribed to it even when it would be to its advantage to do so, while man often deviates from it to his detriment. Thus a Pigeon would starve to death next to a Bowl filled with the choicest meats, and a Cat atop heaps of fruit or of grain, although each could very well have found nourishment in the food it disdains if it had occurred to it to try some; thus dissolute men abandon themselves to excesses which cause them fever and death; because the Mind depraves the senses; and the will continues to speak when Nature is silent.
[16] Every animal has ideas, since it has senses; up to a point it even combines its ideas, and in this respect man differs from the Beast only as more does from less: "Some Philosophers have even suggested that there is a greater difference between one given man and another than there is between a given man and a given beast; it is, then, not so much the understanding that constitutes the specific difference between man and the other animals, as it is his property of being a free agent. Nature commands every animal, and the Beast obeys. Man experiences the same impression, but he recognizes himself free to acquiesce or to resist; and it is mainly in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul exhibits itself: for Physics in a way explains the mechanism of the senses and the formation of Ideas; but in the power of willing, or rather of choosing, and in the sentiment of this power, are found purely spiritual acts about which nothing is explained by the Laws of Mechanics.
[17] But even if the difficulties surrounding all these questions left some room for disagreement about this difference between man and animal, there is another very specific property that distinguishes between them, and about which there can be no argument, namely the faculty of perfecting oneself, a faculty which, with the aid of circumstances, successively develops all the others, and resides in us, in the species as well as in the individual, whereas an animal is at the end of several months what it will be for the rest of its life, and its species is after a thousand years what it was in the first year of those thousand. Why is man alone liable to become imbecile? Is it not that he thus returns to his primitive state and that, whereas e Beast, which has acquired nothing and also has nothing to lose, always keeps its instinct, man again losing through old age or other accidents all that his "perfectibility had made him acquire, thus relapses lower than the Beast itself? It would be sad for us to be forced to agree that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty, is the source of all of man's miseries; that it is the faculty which, by dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would spend tranquil and Innocent days; that it is the faculty which, over the centuries, causing his enlightenment and his errors, vices and his virtues flourish, eventually makes him his own and Nature's tyrant (IX). It would be frightful to be obliged to praise as a beneficent being him who first suggested to the inhabitant of the Banks of the Orinoco the use of the Slats he ties to his Children's temples, and which insure at least a measure of their imbecility and of their original happiness.
[18] Savage Man, left by Nature to bare Instinct alone, or rather compensated for the Instinct he perhaps lacks, by faculties capable of initially making up for it, and of afterwards raising him far above nature, will then begin with purely animal functions: (X) to perceive and to sense will be his first state, which he will have in common with all animals. To will and not to will, to desire and to fear, will be the first and almost the only operations of his soul until new circumstances cause new developments in it.
[19] Regardless of what the Moralists may say about it, the human understanding owes much to the Passions which, as is generally admitted, also owe much to it: It is by their activity that our reason perfects itself; We seek to know only because we desire to enjoy, and it is not possible to conceive why someone who had neither desires nor fears would go to the trouble of reasoning. The Passions, in turn, owe their origin to our needs, and their progress to our knowledge; for one can only desire or fear things in terms of the ideas one can have of them or by the simple impulsion of Nature; and Savage man, deprived of every sort of enlightenment, experiences only the Passions of this latter kind; his Desires do not exceed his Physical needs (XI); The only goods he knows in the Universe are food, a female, and rest; the only evils he fears are pain, and hunger, I say pain, and not death; for an animal will never know what it is to die, and the knowledge of death and of its terrors, is one of man's first acquisitions on moving away from the animal condition.
[20] If I had to do so, I could easily buttress this sentiment with facts, and, in all Nations of the world, show progress of the Mind precisely proportioned to the needs that Peoples received from Nature or to which circumstances subjected them, and consequently to the passions, that moved them to satisfy these needs. I would show the arts being born in Egypt and spreading with the floodings of the Nile; I would follow their progress among the Greeks, where they were seen to burgeon, grow, and rise to the Heavens amid the Sands and Rocks of Attica, without being able to take root on the fertile Banks of the Eurotas; I would point out that in general the Peoples of the North are more industrious than those of the south because they can less afford not to be so, as if Nature wanted in this way to equalize things by endowing Minds with the fertility it denies the Soll.
[21] But without resorting to the uncertain testimonies of History, who fails to see that everything seems to remove from Savage man the temptation as well as the means o cease being savage? His Imagination depicts nothing to him; his heart demands nothing of him. His modest needs are so ready to hand, and he is so far from the degree of knowledge needed to wish to acquire greater knowledge, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity. The spectacle of Nature becomes so familiar to him that he becomes Indifferent to it. Forever the same order, forever the same revolutions; he lacks the wit to wonder at the greatest marvels; and it is not to him that one will turn for the Philosophy man needs in order to be able, for once to observe what he has seen every day. His soul, which nothing stirs, yields itself to the sole sentiment of its present existence, with no idea of the future, however near it may be, and his projects, as limited as his views, hardly extend to the end of day. Such is still nowadays the extent of the Carib's foresight: He sells his Cotton bed in the morning and comes weeping to buy it back in the evening, for not having foreseen that he would need it for the coming night.
[22] The more one meditates on this subject, the greater does the distance between pure sensations and the simplest knowledge grow in our eyes; and it is impossible to conceive how a man, by his own strength alone, without the help of communication, and without the spur of necessity, could have crossed so great a divide. How many centuries perhaps elapsed before men were in a position to see any other fire than that of Heaven? How many different chance occurrences must they have needed before they learned the most common uses of this element? How many times must they have let it go out before they mastered the art of reproducing it? And how many times did each one of these secrets perhaps die together with its discoverer? What shall we say about agriculture, an art requiring so much labor and foresight: dependent other arts, that can quite obviously be pursued only in a society that has at least begun, and that we use not so much to draw forth from the Ground foods it would readily yield without agriculture as to force it to preferences that are more to our taste? But let us suppose that men had multiplied so much that natural produce no longer sufficed to feed them; a supposition which, incidentally, would point to one great advantage for the human Species in this way of life; Let us suppose that without forges, and without Workshops, the tools for Farming had dropped from Heaven into the Savages' hands; that these men had overcome the mortal hatred they all have for sustained work; that they had learned to foresee their needs sufficiently far ahead, that they had guessed how to cultivate the Earth, sow grain and plant Trees; that they had discovered the art of grinding Wheat and of fermenting grapes; all of them things which the Gods had to be made to teach them for want of conceiving how they could have learned them on their own; what man would, after all this, be so senseless as to torment himself with cultivating a Field that will be despoiled by the first comer, man or beast, fancying this harvest; and how will anyone resolve to spend his life doing hard work when the more he needs Its rewards, the more certain he is not to reap them? In a word, how can this situation possibly dispose men to cultivate the Earth so long as it has not been divided among them, that is to say so long as the state of Nature is not annihilated?
[23] Even if we should wish to suppose a Savage man as skillful in the art of thinking as our Philosophers make him out to be; even if, following their example, we should make of him a Philosopher as well, who discovers alone the most sublime truths, who by chains of extremely abstract reasoning establishes for himself maxims of justice and reason derived either from the love of order in general, or from the known will of his Creator, in a word, even if we should suppose him to have a mind as intelligent and as enlightened as it must be, and, indeed, is found to be, heavy and stupid, what use would the Species derive from all this Metaphysics, that could not be communicated and would perish with the individual had invented it? What progress could Mankind make, scattered in the Woods among the Animals? And how much could men perfect and enlighten one another who, having neither a fixed Dwelling nor any need of one another, might perhaps meet no more than twice in their life, without recognizing and speaking with one another?
[24] If one considers how many ideas we owe to the use of speech; How much Grammar exercises and facilitates the operations of the Mind; if one thinks about the inconceivable efforts and the infinite time the first invention of Languages must have cost; If one adds these reflections to those that preceded, then one can judge how many thousands of Centuries would have been required for the successive development in the human Mind of the Operations of which it was capable.
[25] Let me be allowed briefly to consider the perplexities regarding the origin of Languages. I could leave it at here quoting or restating the Abbe de Condillac's Investigations of this matter, all of which fully confirm my sentiment, and which perhaps suggested its first idea to me. But since the manner in which this Philosopher resolves the difficulties he himself raises regarding the origin of instituted signs shows that he assumed what I question, namely some sort of society already established among the inventors of language, I believe that I ought to supplement the reference to his reflections with reflections of my own, in order to exhibit these same difficulties in the light best suited to my subject. The first difficulty that arises is to imagine how languages could have become necessary; for, Men having no relations with one another and no need of any, the necessity or the possibility of this invention is inconceivable unless it was unavoidable. I would be prepared to say, as many others do, that Languages arose in the domestic dealings between Fathers, Mothers and Children: but not only would this fall to meet the objections, it would be to commit the fallacy of those who, in reasoning about the state of Nature, carry over into it ideas taken from Society, and always see the family assembled in one and the same dwelling and its members maintaining among themselves Intimate and as permanent a union as they do among us, where so many common interests unite them; whereas in this primitive state, without Houses or Huts or property of any kind, everyone bedded down at random and often for one night only; males and females united fortuitously, according to chance encounters, opportunity, and desire, without speech being an especially necessary Interpreter of what they had to tell one another; they parted just as readily; (XII) The mother at first nursed her Children because of her own need; then, habit having endeared them to her, she went on to feed them because of theirs; as soon as they had the strength to forage on their own, they left even the Mother; And since almost the only way to find one another again was not to lose sight of one another in the first place, they soon were at the point of not even recognizing each other. Note, further, that since the Child has all of its needs to explain, and hence has more things to say to the Mother than the Mother has to the Child, it is the child that must contribute most to the invention, and that the language it uses must largely be of its own making; which multiplies Languages by as many as there are Individuals who speak them; their roving and vagabond life further contributes to this multiplication of languages, since it allows no idiom enough time to become consistent; for to say that the Mother dictates to the Child the words it will have to use in order to ask her for one thing or another shows how already formed Languages are taught, but it does not tell how they are formed.
[26] Let us suppose this first difficulty overcome: Let us for a moment cross the immense distance there must have been between the pure state of Nature and the need for Languages; and, assuming them to be necessary (XIII), let us inquire how they might have begun to get established. New difficulty, even worse than the preceding one; for if Men needed speech in order to learn how to think, they needed even more to know how to think in order to discover the art of speech; and even if it were understood how the sounds of the voice came to be taken for the conventional interpreters of our ideas, it would still leave open the question of what could have been the interpreters of this convention for Ideas that, having no perceptible object, could not be pointed to by gesture or by voice, so that it is scarcely possible to form tenable conjectures about the origin of this Art of communicating one's thoughts, and of establishing exchanges between Minds: A sublime art which is already so far from its Origin but which the Philosopher sees as still so immensely far removed from perfection that no man is bold enough to assure that it will ever be reached, even if the revolutions which time necessarily brings about were suspended in its favor, even if Prejudices were to retire from Academies or fall silent before Them, and They could attend to this thorny topic for Centuries together without interruption.
[27] Man's first language, the most universal, the most energetic and the only language he needed before it was necessary to persuade assembled men, is the cry of Nature. Since this cry was wrested from him only by a sort of Instinct on urgent occasions, to implore help in great dangers or relief in violent pain, it was not of much use in the ordinary course of life, where more moderate sentiments prevail. When men's ideas began to expand and to multiply, and closer communication was established among them, they sought more numerous signs and a more extensive language: They multiplied the inflections of the voice and added gestures to it that are by their Nature more expressive, and less dependent for their meaning on some prior decision. Thus they expressed visible and moving objects by means of gestures, and objects that strike the ear by imitative sounds: but because gesture indicates almost only present or easily described objects and visible actions; because it is not universally serviceable since darkness or an interfering body render it useless, and because it requires attention rather than exciting it; it finally occurred to men to substitute for it the articulations of the voice which, although they do not stand in the same relation to some ideas, are better suited to represent them all, Inasmuch as they are instituted signs; a substitution that can only have been made by common consent, which men whose crude vocal apparatus had as yet had no practice must have found rather difficult to implement, and which is even more difficult to conceive of in itself, because there must have been some motive for this unanimous agreement, and because speech seems to have been very necessary in order to establish the use of speech.
[28] It would seem that the first words men used had in their Mind a much wider reference than do words used in already formed Languages, and that since they were ignorant of the Division of Discourse into its constituent parts, they at first assigned to each word the meaning of an entire proposition. When they began to distinguish between subject and predicate, and verb and noun, which was no mean feat of genius, substantives were at first just so many proper names, the present Infinitive was the only tense of verbs, and as for adjectives, the very notion must have developed only with great difficulty, because every adjective is an abstract word, and abstractions are difficult and not particularly natural Operations.
[29] Each object was at first given a particular name without regard to genera and Species, which these first Institutors were not able to distinguish; and all individuals presented themselves to their mind in isolation, just as they are seen in Nature. If one Oak was called A, another Oak was called B; for the first idea one derives from two objects is that they are not the same, and it often takes a good deal of time to notice what they have in common: so that the more limited knowledge was, the more extensive did the Dictionary grow. The clutter of all this Nomenclature was not easily cleared: for, in order to subsume the beings under common and generic designations, their properties and differences had to be known; observations and definitions were needed, that is to say much more Natural History and Metaphysics than the men of that time could have had.
[30] Besides, general ideas can enter the Mind only with the help of words, and the understanding grasps them only by means of propositions. That is one of the reasons why animals could not form such ideas, nor ever acquire the perfectibility that depends on them. When a Monkey unhesitatingly goes from one nut to another, are we to think that it has the general idea of this sort of fruit and compares its archetype with these two individuals? Surely not; but the sight of one of these nuts recalls to his memory the sensations he received from the other, and his eyes, modified in a certain way, announce to his taste how it is about to be modified. Every general idea is purely intellectual; if the imagination is at all involved, the idea immediately becomes particular. Try to outline the image of a tree in general to yourself, you will never succeed; in spite of yourself it will have to be seen as small or large, bare or leafy, light or dark, and if you could see in it only what there is in every tree, the image would no longer resemble a tree. Purely abstract beings are either seen in the same way, or they are conceived of only by means of discourse. Only the definition of a Triangle gives you the genuine idea of it: As soon as you depict one in your mind, it is a given Triangle and not another, and you cannot help making its lines perceptible or its surface colored. Hence one has to state propositions, hence one has to speak in order to have general ideas: for as soon as the imagination stops, the mind can proceed only by means of discourse. If, then, the first Inventors could give names only to the ideas they already had, it follows that the first substantives could never have been anything but proper names.
[31] But when, by means of which I cannot conceive, our new Grammarians began to expand their ideas and to generalize their words, the Inventors' ignorance must have restricted this method to within very narrow bounds; and as they had at first gone too far in multiplying the names of individuals because they did not know genera and species, they subsequently made too few species and genera because they had not considered the Beings in all their differences. Extending the divisions far enough would have required more experience and enlightenment than they could have had, and more research and work than they were willing to devote to it. If even today new species are daily discovered that had so far escaped all our observations, think how many must have eluded men who judged things only by their first impression! As for primary Classes and the most general notions, it would be superfluous to add that they, too, must have escaped them: How, for instance, would they have imagined or understood the words matter, mind, substance, mode, figure, motion, since our Philosophers, who have been using them for such a long time, themselves have considerable difficulty understanding them, and since, the ideas attached to these words being purely Metaphysical, they found no model of them in Nature?
[32] I pause after these first steps, and beg my Judges to suspend their Reading here, to consider, in the light of the invention of Physical nouns alone, that is to say in the light of the most easily found part of Language, how far it still has to go before it can express all of men's thoughts, assume a stable form, admit of being spoken in public, and have an influence on Society: I beg them to reflect on how much time and knowledge it took to find numbers (XIV), abstract words, Aorists, and all the tenses of Verbs, particles, Syntax, to connect Propositions, arguments, and to develop the entire Logic of Discourse. As for myself, frightened by the growing number of difficulties and convinced of the almost demonstrated impossibility that Languages could have arisen and been established by purely human means, I leave to anyone who wishes to undertake it the discussion of this difficult Problem: which was the more necessary, an already united Society for the institution of Languages, or already invented Languages for the establishment of Society?
[33] Whatever may be the case regarding these origins, it is at least clear, from how little care Nature has taken to bring Men together through mutual needs and to facilitate their use of speech, how little it prepared their Sociability, and how little of its own it has contributed to everything men have done to establish its bonds. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine why, in that primitive state, a man would need another man any more than a monkey or a Wolf would need his kind, or, assuming this need, to imagine what motives could induce the other to attend to it, or even, if he did, how they might agree on terms. I know that "we are repeatedly told that nothing would have been as miserable as man in this state; and if it is true, as I believe I have proved, that he could have had the desire and the opportunity to leave it only after many Centuries, this would be an Indictment of Nature, not of him whom nature had so constituted; but if I understand this term miserable correctly, it is a word either entirely devoid of meaning or that merely signifies a painful privation and suffering of Body or soul: Now, I should very much like to have it explained to me what kind of misery there can be for a free being, whose heart is at peace, and body in health. I ask, which of the two, Civil life or natural life, is more liable to become intolerable to those who enjoy it? We see around us almost only People who complain of their existence, and some even deprive themselves of it as far as they are able, and the combination of divine and human Laws hardly suffices to stop this disorder: I ask whether anyone has ever heard tell that it so much as occurred to a Savage, who is free, to complain of life and to kill himself? One ought, then, to judge with less pride on which side genuine misery lies. Nothing, on the contrary, would have been as miserable as Savage man dazzled by enlightenment, tormented by Passions, and reasoning about a state different from his own. It was by a very wise Providence that the faculties he had in potentiality were to develop only with the opportunities to exercise them, so that they might not be superfluous and a burden to him before their time, nor belated and useless in time of need. In instinct alone he had all he needed to live in the state of Nature, in cultivated reason he has no more than what he needs to live in society.
[34] It seems at first that men in that state having neither moral relations of any kind between them nor known duties, could be neither good nor wicked, and had neither vices nor virtues, unless these words are taken in a physical sense and the qualities that can harm an individual's self-preservation are called vices, and those that can contribute to it, virtues; in which case he who least resists the simple impulsions of Nature would have to be called the most virtuous: But without straying from the ordinary sense, we should suspend the judgment we might pass on such a situation, and be wary of our Prejudices until it has been established, Scale in hand, whether there are more virtues than vices among civilized men, or whether their virtues are more advantageous than their vices are detrimental, or whether the progress of their knowledge is sufficient compensation for the harms they do one another in proportion as they learn of the good they should do, or whether their situation would not, on the whole, be happier if they had neither harm to fear nor good to hope for from anyone, than they are by having subjected themselves to universal dependence and obligated themselves to receive everything from those who do not obligate themselves to give them anything.
[35] Above all, let us not conclude with Hobbes that because he has no idea of goodness man is naturally wicked, that he is vicious because he does not know virtue, that he always refuses to those of his kind services which he does not believe he owes them, or that by virtue of the right which he reasonably claims to the things he needs, he insanely imagines himself to be the sole owner of the entire Universe. Hobbes very clearly saw the defect of all modern definitions of Natural right: but the conclusions he draws from his own definition show that he understands it in a sense that is no less false. By reasoning on the basis of the principles he establishes, this Author should have said that, since the state of Nature is the state in which the care for our own preservation is least prejudicial to the self-preservation of others, it follows that this state was the most conducive to Peace and the best suited to Mankind. He says precisely the opposite because he improperly included in Savage man's care for his preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions that are the product of Society and have made Laws necessary. A wicked man is, he says, a sturdy Child; it remains to be seen whether Savage Man is a sturdy Child; Even if it were granted him that he is, what would he conclude? That if this man, when sturdy, were as dependent on others as when he is weak, he would not stop at any kind of excess, that he would strike his Mother if she were slow to give him the breast, that he would strangle one of his young brothers if he discommoded him, that he would bite the other's leg if he hurt or bothered him; but being sturdy and being dependent are two contradictory assumptions in the state of Nature; Man is weak when he is dependent, and he is emancipated before he is sturdy. Hobbes did not see that the same cause that keeps Savages from using their reason, as our Jurists claim they do, at the same time keeps them from abusing their faculties, as he himself claims they do; so that one might say that Savages are not wicked precisely because they do not know what it is to be good; for it is neither the growth of enlightenment nor the curb of the Law, but the calm of the passions and the ignorance of vice that keep them from evil-doing; so much more does the ignorance of vice profit these than the knowledge of virtue profits those others. There is, besides, another Principle Hobbes did not notice and which, having been given to man in order under certain circumstances to soften the ferocity of his amour propre or of the desire for self-preservation before the birth of amour propre, (XV) tempers his ardor for well-being by an innate repugnance to see his kind suffer. I do not believe I need fear any contradiction in granting to man the only Natural virtue which the most extreme Detractor of human virtues was forced to acknowledge. I speak of Pity, a disposition suited to beings as weak and as subject to so many ills as we are; a virtue all the more universal and useful to man as it precedes the exercise of all reflection in him, and so Natural that even the Beasts sometimes show evident signs of it. To say nothing of the tenderness Mothers feel for their young and of the dangers they brave in order to protect them, one daily sees the repugnance of Horses to trample a living Body underfoot; An animal never goes past a dead animal of his own Species without some restlessness: Some even give them a kind of burial; and the mournful lowing of Cattle entering a Slaughter-House conveys their impression of the horrible sight that strikes them. It is a pleasure to see the author of the Fable of the Bees forced to recognize man as a compassionate and sensitive Being, and abandon, in the example he gives of it, his cold and subtle style, to offer us the pathetic picture of a man locked up, who outside sees a ferocious Beast tearing a Child from his Mother's breast, breaking his weak limbs with its murderous fangs, and tearing the Child's throbbing entrails with its claws. What a dreadful agitation must not this witness to an event in which he takes no personal interest whatsoever experience? What anguish must he not suffer at this sight, for not being able to give any help to the fainted Mother or the dying Child?
[36] Such is the pure movement of Nature prior to all reflection: such is the force of natural pity, which the most depraved morals still have difficulty destroying, since one dally sees in our theaters people being moved and weeping at the miseries of some unfortunate person who, if they were in the Tyrant's place, would only increase their enemy's torments; like bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to ills which he had not caused, or that Alexander of Pherae who dared not attend the performance of a single tragedy for fear that he might be seen to sob with Andromache and Priam, but who listened without emotion to the cries of so many citizens daily being murdered on his orders.
When nature gave man tears, She proclaimed that he was tender-hearted.
[37] Mandeville clearly sensed that, for all their morality, men would never have been anything but monsters if Nature had not given them pity in support of reason: but he did not see that from this single attribute flow all the social virtues he wants to deny to men. Indeed, what are generosity, Clemency, Humanity, if not Pity applied to the weak, the guilty, or the human species in general? Even Benevolence and friendship, properly understood, are the products of a steady pity focused on a particular object; for what else is it to wish that someone not suffer, than to wish that he be happy? Even if it were true that commiseration is nothing but a sentiment that puts us in the place of him who suffers, a sentiment that is obscure and lively in Savage man, developed but weak in Civil man, what difference could this idea make to the truth of what I say, except to give it additional force? Indeed commiseration will be all the more energetic in proportion as the Onlooking animal identifies more intimately with the suffering animal: Now this identification must, clearly, have been infinitely closer in the state of Nature than in the state of reasoning. It is reason that engenders amour propre, and reflection that reinforces it; reason that turns man back upon himself, reason that separates him from everything that troubles and afflicts him: It is Philosophy that isolates him; by means of Philosophy he secretly says, at the sight of a suffering man, perish if you wish, I am safe. Only dangers that threaten the entire society still disturb the Philosopher's tranquil slumber, and rouse him from his bed. One of his kind can with impunity be murdered beneath his window; he only has to put his hands over his ears and to argue with himself a little in order to prevent Nature, which rebels within him, from letting him identify with the man being assassinated. Savage man has not this admirable talent; and for want of wisdom and of reason he is always seen to yield impetuously to the first sentiment of Humanity. In Riots, in Street-brawls, the Populace gathers, the prudent man withdraws; it is the rabble, it is the Marketwomen who separate the combatants, and keeps honest folk from murdering one another.
[38] It is therefore quite certain that pity is a natural sentiment which, by moderating in every individual the activity of self-love, contributes to the mutual preservation of the entire species. It is pity that carries us without reflection to the assistance of those we see suffer, pity that, in the state of Nature, takes the place of Laws, morals, and virtue, with the advantage that no one is tempted to disobey its gentle voice; pity that will keep any sturdy Savage from robbing a weak child or an infirm old man of his hard-won subsistence if he can hope to find his own elsewhere: pity that, in place of that sublime maxim of reasoned Justice Do unto others as you would have them do unto you, Inspires in all Men this other maxim of natural goodness, much less perfect but perhaps more useful than the first: Do your good with the least possible harm to others. It is, in a word, in this Natural sentiment rather than in subtle arguments that one has to seek the cause of the repugnance to evil-doing which every human being would feel even Independently of the maxims of education. While Socrates and minds of his stamp may be able to acquire virtue through reason, mankind would long ago have ceased to be if its preservation had depended solely on the reasonings of those who make it up.
[39] With such sluggish passions and such a salutary curb, fierce rather than wicked, and more intent on protecting themselves from the harm they might suffer than tempted to inflict harm on others, men were not prone to very dangerous fights: since they had no dealings of any kind with one another; since they therefore knew neither vanity, nor consideration, nor esteem, nor contempt; since they had not the slightest notion of thine and mine, or any genuine idea of justice; since they viewed any violence they might suffer as an easily repaired harm rather than as a punishable injury, and since they did not even dream of vengeance except perhaps mechanically and on the spot like the dog that bites the stone thrown at it; their quarrels would seldom have led to bloodshed if they had had no more urgent object than Food: but I see one that is more dangerous, which it remains for me to discuss.
[40] Among the passions that stir man's heart, there is one that is ardent, impetuous, and makes one sex necessary to the other, a terrible passion that braves all dangers, overcomes all obstacles, and in its frenzy seems liable to destroy the Mankind which it is destined to preserve. What will become of men possessed by this unbridled and brutal rage, lacking modesty, lacking restraint, and daily feuding over their loves at the price of their blood?
[41] Granting from the outset that the more violent the passions, the more Laws are needed to contain them: still, quite aside from the fact that the disorders and the crimes the Laws dally cause among us sufficiently prove their inadequacy In this respect, it would be good also to inquire whether these disorders did not arise together with the Laws; for if they did, even if they could repress the disorders they cause, surely the very least that should be required of them is to put a stop to an evil that would not exist without them.
[42] Let us begin by distinguishing the moral from the Physical in the sentiment of love. The Physical is this general desire that moves one sex to unite with the other, the moral is what gives this desire its distinctive character and focuses it exclusively on a single object, or at least gives it a greater measure of energy for this preferred object. Now it is easy to see that the moral aspect of love is a factitious sentiment; born of social practice, and extolled with much skill and care by women in order to establish their rule and to make dominant the sex that should obey. This sentiment, since it is based on certain notions of merit or of beauty which a Savage is not in a position to have, and on comparisons he is not In a position to make, must be almost nonexistent for him: For as his mind could not form abstract ideas of regularity and of proportion, so his heart cannot feel the sentiments of admiration and of love that arise, without our even noticing it, from applying these ideas; he heeds only the temperament he received from Nature, and not a taste which he could not have acquired, and any woman suits him.
[43] Limited to the Physical aspect of love alone, and fortunate enough not to know the preferences that exacerbate its sentiment and increase its difficulties, men must feel the ardors of temperament less frequently and less vividly, and hence have fewer and less cruel quarrels with one another. The imagination, which wreaks such havoc among us, does not speak to Savage hearts; each peacefully awaits the impulsion of Nature, yields to it without choosing to, with more pleasure than frenzy, and, the need once satisfied, all desire is extinguished.
[44] It is therefore indisputable that love itself, like all the other passions, acquired only in society the impetuous ardor that so often causes it to be fatal among men, and it is all the more ridiculous to portray Savages as constantly murdering one another in order to satisfy their brutality, as this opinion goes directly counter to experience, and as the Caribs which, of all existing Peoples has up to now moved least far from the state of Nature, are in fact also the most peaceful in their loves and the least given to jealousy, even though they live in a scorching Climate which always seems to rouse these passions to greater activity.
[45] Regarding the Inferences that might be drawn in a number of animal species from the fights between the Males that bloody our barn yards at all seasons or make our forests resound in Springtime with their cries as they feud over a female, we must begin by excluding from consideration all species where Nature has clearly established different relations in the relative power of the Sexes than among us: Thus Cock-fights do not provide a basis for inferences about the human species. In species where the Proportion is more even, such fights can only be caused by the scarcity of females in relation to the number of Males, or by the periods of exclusion during which the female consistently spurs the male's advances, which amounts to the first cause; for if each female tolerates the male only two months of the year, it is in this respect tantamount to having the number of females reduced by five-sixths: Now, neither of these alternatives applies to the human species, where the number of females generally exceeds that of males, and where, even among Savages, females have never been known to have oestrus cycles as do those of other species. Moreover, among several of these animals, where the entire species ruts at the same time, there comes one terrible moment of common ardor, tumult, disorder, and fighting: a moment which does not occur in the human species, where love is never that periodic. One can therefore not conclude from the fights of some animals for the possession of females that the same thing would happen to man in the state of Nature; and even if one could draw this conclusion, since such dissensions do not destroy the other species, it seems at least reasonable that they would not be any more fatal to ours, and it is quite evident that they would still wreak less havoc in the state of nature than they do in Society, especially in Countries where Morals still count for something and the jealousy of Lovers and the vengeance of Husbands dally cause Duels, Murders, and worse; where the duty of eternal fidelity only makes for adulteries, and where even the Laws of continence and of honor inevitably increase debauchery, and multiply abortions.
[46] Let us conclude that, wandering in the forests without industry, without speech, without settled abode, without war, and without ties, without any need of others of his kind and without any desire to harm them, perhaps even without ever recognizing any one of them Individually, subject to few passions and self-sufficient, Savage man had only the sentiments and the enlightenment suited to this state, that he sensed only his true needs, looked only at what he believed it to be in his interest to see, and that his intelligence made no more progress than his vanity. If by chance he made some discovery, he was all the less in a position to communicate it as he did not recognize even his Children. The art perished with the Inventor; there was neither education nor progress, generations multiplied uselessly; and since each one of them always started at the same point, Centuries went by in all the crudeness of the first ages, the species had already grown old, and man remained ever a child.
[47] If I have dwelt at such length on the assumption of this primitive condition, it is because, having ancient errors and Inveterate prejudices to destroy, I believed I had to dig to the root, and to show in the depiction of the genuine state of Nature how far Inequality, even natural inequality, is from having as much reality and Influence in that state as our Writers claim.
[48] Indeed it is easy to see that, among the differences that distinguish men, several are taken to be natural although they are exclusively the result of habit and of the different ways of life men adopt in Society. Thus a sturdy or a delicate temperament, together with the strength or the weakness that are due to it, often owe more to a tough or an effeminate upbringing than to the bodies' primitive constitution. The same is true of strengths of Mind, and education not only Introduces differences between Minds that are cultivated and those that are not, but also increases the differences between cultivated Minds in proportion to their culture; for when a Glant and a Dwarf travel the same road, every step they take will give the Giant an added advantage. Now if one compares the prodigious variety of educations and ways of life that prevails in the different orders of the civil state with the simplicity and the uniformity of animal and savage life, where all eat the same foods, live in the same fashion, and do exactly the same things, it will be evident how much smaller must be the difference between man and man in the state of Nature than in the state of society, and how much natural Inequality in the human species must increase as a result of instituted Inequality.
[49] But even if Nature displayed as much partiality in the distribution of its gifts as is claimed, what advantage would the more favored enjoy at the expense of the others in a state of things that allowed for almost no relations of any sort between them? Where there is no love, of what use is beauty? Of what use is wit to people who do not speak, and cunning to those who have no dealings with one another? I constantly hear it repeated that the stronger will oppress the weak; but explain to me what the word oppression here means? Some will dominate by violence, the others will groan, subject to all their whims! this is precisely what I see among us, but I do not see how the same could be said about Savage men, whom it would even be rather difficult to get to understand what subjection and domination are. A man might seize the fruits another has picked, the game he killed, the lair he used for shelter; but how will he ever succeed in getting himself obeyed by him, and what would be the chains of dependence among men who possess nothing? If I am chased from one tree, I just go to another one. If I am tormented in one place, who will keep me from going somewhere else? Is there a man so superior to me in strength, and who, in addition, is so depraved, so lazy, and so ferocious as to force me to provide for his subsistence while he remains idle? He will have to make up his mind not to let me out of his sight for a single moment and to keep me very carefully tied up while he sleeps for fear that I might escape or kill him: which is to say that he is obliged to incur willingly a great deal more trouble than he seeks to avoid and than he causes me. After all this, what if his vigilance relaxes for a moment? What if an unexpected noise causes him turn his head? I take twenty steps into the forest, my chains are broken, and he never sees me again in his life.
[50] Without needlessly drawing out these details, it must be evident to everyone that since bonds of servitude are formed solely by men's mutual dependence and the reciprocal needs that unite them, it is impossible to subjugate a man without first having placed him in the position of being unable to do without another; a situation which, since it does not obtain in the state of Nature, leaves everyone in it free of the yoke, and renders vain the Law of the stronger.
[51] Having proved that Inequality is scarcely perceptible in the state of Nature and that its influence in it is almost nil, it remains for me to show its origin and its progress in the successive developments of the human mind. Having shown that perfectibility, the social virtues and the other faculties which natural man had received in potentiality could never develop by themselves, that in order to do so, they needed the fortuitous concatenation of several foreign causes which might never have arisen and without which he would eternally have remained in his primitive constitution; it remains for me to consider and bring together the various chance events that can have perfected human reason while deteriorating the species, made a being wicked by making it sociable, and from so remote a beginning finally brought man and the world to the point where we now see them.
[52] I recognize that since the events I have to describe could have occurred in several ways, I can choose between them only on the basis of conjectures; but not only do such conjectures become reasons when they are the most probable that can be derived from the nature of things and the only means available to discover the truth, it also does not follow that the consequences I want to deduce from mine will therefore be conjectural since, on the principles I have just established, no other system could be formed that would not give me the same results and from which I could not draw the same conclusions.
[53] This will exempt me from expanding my reflections about how the lapse of time makes up for the slight likelihood of events; about the astonishing power of very slight causes when they act without let up; about the impossibility, on the one hand, of rejecting certain hypotheses without, on the other hand, being in a position to attach to them the certainty of facts; about how, when two facts given as real are to be connected by a sequence of intermediate facts that are unknown or believed to be so, it is up to history, if available, to provide the facts that connect them; about how, in the absence of history, it is up to Philosophy to ascertain similar facts that might connect them; finally about this, that with respect to outcomes, similarity reduces facts to a much smaller number of different classes than people imagine. It is enough for me to submit these issues for consideration to my Judges: It is enough for me to have seen to it that vulgar Readers need not consider them.
Part II.
[1] The first person who, having enclosed a plot of ground, thought to say, “This is mine,” and found people stupid enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors Mankind would have been spared by him who, pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had cried out to his kind: Beware of listening to this Impostor, You are lost if you forget that the fruits are everyone's and the Earth no one's: But In all likelihood things had by then reached a point where they could no longer remain as they were; for this idea of property, depending on many prior ideas which could only arise successively, did not take shape all at once in man's mind: Much progress had to have been made, Industry and enlightenment acquired, transmitted and increased from one age to the next, before this last stage of the state of Nature was reached. Let us therefore reach further back and try to bring together this slow succession of events and of knowledge from a single point of view and in their most natural order.
[2] Man's first sentiment was that of his existence, his first care that for his preservation. The Earth's products provided him with all the support he needed, Instinct moved him to use it. While hunger and other appetites caused him to experience by turns different ways of existing, there was one appetite that invited him to perpetuate his species; and this blind Inclination, devoid of any sentiment of the heart, produced only a purely animal act. The need satisfied, the two sexes no longer recognized one another, and even the child no longer meant anything to the Mother as soon as it could do without her.
[3] Such was the condition of nascent man; such was the life of an animal at first restricted to pure sensations, and scarcely profiting from the gifts Nature offered him, let alone dreaming of wresting anything from it; but soon difficulties arose; it became necessary to learn to overcome them: the height of Trees that prevented him from reaching their fruits, competition from the animals trying to eat these fruits, the ferocity of those that threatened his very life, everything obliged him to attend to bodily exercise; he had to become agile, run fast, fight vigorously. The natural weapons, branches and stones, were soon at hand. He learned to overcome the obstacles of Nature, to fight other animals when necessary, to contend even with men for his subsistence, or to make up for what had to be yielded to the stronger.
[4] In proportion as Mankind spread, difficulties multiplied together with men. Differences of soil, Climate, seasons, may have forced them to introduce differences into their ways of life. Barren years, long and harsh winters, scorching all- consuming Summers, required renewed industry on their part. Along the sea and Rivers they Invented line and hook; and became fishermen and Fish-eaters. In forests they made bows and arrows, and became Hunters and Warriors; In cold Countries they covered themselves with the skins of the animals they had killed; Lightning, a Volcano, or some happy accident acquainted them with fire, a new resource against the rigors of winter. They learned to conserve this element, then to reproduce it, and finally to prepare with it the meats they had previously devoured raw.
[5] This repeated Interaction of the various beings with himself as well as with one another must naturally have engendered perceptions of certain relations in man's mind. The relations that we express by the words great, small, strong, weak, fast, slow, fearful, bold, and other such ideas, compared as need required and almost without thinking about it, finally produced in him some sort of reflection, or rather a mechanical prudence that suggested to him the precautions most necessary for his safety.
[6] The new enlightenment that resulted from this development Increased his superiority over the other animals by acquainting him with it. He practiced setting traps for them, he tricked them in a thousand ways, and although a number of them might surpass him in strength in fighting, or in speed in running, he became in time the master of those that could be useful, and the scourge of those that could be harmful to him. This is how his first look at himself aroused the first movement of pride in him; this is how, while as yet scarcely able to discriminate ranks, and considering himself in the first rank as a species, he was from afar preparing to claim first rank as an individual.
[7] Although others of his kind were not for him what they are for us, and he had scarcely more dealings with them than with the other animals, they were not neglected in his observations. The conformities which time may have led him to perceive between them, his female, and himself, led him to Inferences about conformities he did not perceive, and seeing that they all behaved as he would have done in similar circumstances, he concluded that their way of thinking and of feeling fully corresponded to his own, and this important truth, once it was firmly settled in his mind, made him follow, by a premonition as sure as Dialectics and more rapid, the best rules of conduct to observe with them for his advantage and safety.
[8] Taught by experience that love of well-being is the sole spring of human actions, he was in a position to distinguish between the rare occasions when common interest should make him count on the help of his kind, and the even rarer occasions when competition should make him distrust them. In the first case he united with them in a herd or at most in some kind of free association that obligated no one and lasted only as long as the passing need that had formed it. In the second case everyone sought to seize his own advantage, either by open force if he believed that he could do so; or by skill and cunning, if he felt he was the weaker.
[9] This is how men might imperceptibly have acquired some crude idea of mutual engagements and of the advantage of fulfilling them, but only as far as present and perceptible interest might require; for foresight was nothing to them and, far from being concerned with a distant future, they did not even give thought to the next day. If a Stag was to be caught, everyone clearly sensed that this required him faithfully to keep his post; but if a hare happened to pass within reach of one of them, there can be no doubt that he will have chased after it without a scruple and, after catching his prey, have cared very little about having caused his Companions to miss theirs.
[10] It is easy to understand that such dealings did not require a language much more refined than that of Crows or Monkeys, which troop together in approximately the same way. Some Inarticulate cries, many gestures, and a few imitative noises must, for a long time, have made up the universal Language, [and] the addition to it, in every Region, of a few articulated and conventional sounds - the institution of which is, as I have already said, none too easy to explain - made for particular languages, crude, Imperfect and more or less such as various Savage Nations have now. I cover multitudes of Centuries in a flash, forced by time running out, the abundance of things I have to say, and the almost imperceptible progress of the beginnings; for the more slowly events succeeded one another, the more quickly can they be described.
[11] These first advances eventually placed man within reach of making more rapid ones. The more the mind became enlightened, the more did Industry become perfected. Soon ceasing to fall asleep underneath the first tree or to withdraw Into Caves, they found they could use hard, sharp stones as hatchets to cut wood, dig the earth, and make huts of branches which it later occurred to them to daub with clay and mud. This was the period of a first revolution that brought about the establishment and differentiation of families, and introduced a sort of property; from which there perhaps already arose a good many quarrels and Fights. However, since the stronger were probably the first to make themselves dwellings they felt they could defend, it seems plausible that the weak found it simpler and safer to imitate them than to try to dislodge them: and as for those who already had Huts, a man must rarely have tried to appropriate his neighbor's, not so much because it did not belong to him as because it was of no use to him, and he could not get hold of it without risking a very lively fight with the family that occupied It.
[12] The first developments of the heart were the effect of a new situation that brought husbands and Wives, Fathers and Children together in a common dwelling; the habit of living together gave rise to the sweetest sentiments known to man, conjugal love and Paternal love. Each family became a small Society, all the better united as mutual attachment and freedom were its only bonds; and this is when the first difference was established in the way of life of the two Sexes, which until then had had but one. Women became more sedentary and grew accustomed to looking after the Hut and the Children, while the man went in quest of the common subsistence. As a result of their somewhat softer life both sexes also
began to lose something of their ferocity and vigor: but while each separately grew less fit to fight wild beasts, in exchange it became easier to assemble in order to resist them together.
[13] In this new state, with a simple and solitary life, very limited needs and the implements they had invented to provide for them, men enjoyed a great deal of leisure which they used to acquire several sorts of conveniences unknown to their Fathers; and this was the first yoke which they imposed on themselves without realizing it, and the first source of evils that they prepared for their Descendants; for not only did they, In this way, continue to weaken body and mind but since these conveniences, by becoming habitual, had almost entirely ceased to be enjoyable, and at the same time had degenerated into true needs, it became much more cruel to be deprived of them than to possess them was sweet, and men were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them.
[14] Here one catches a somewhat better glimpse of how the use of speech is imperceptibly established or perfected in the bosom of each family, and one can further conjecture how various particular causes could enlarge language and accelerate its progress by making it more necessary. Great floods or earthquakes surrounded inhabited Areas with water or precipices; Revolutions of the Globe broke off portions of the Continent and carved them into Islands. It seems likely that a common idiom was formed earlier among men brought into closer proximity with one another in this fashion and forced to live together, than among those who roamed freely through the forests of the Mainland. Thus it is very possible that Islanders, after their first attempts at Navigation, introduced the use of speech among us; and it is at least very likely that Society and languages arose in Islands and were perfected there before they were known on the Continent.
[15] Everything begins to change in appearance. Men, who until then had roamed the Woods, having become more settled, gradually come together, unite in various troops, and by and by form in each region a particular Nation united by morals and character, not by Rules or Laws but by the same kind of life and of foods, and the influence of a shared Climate. Permanent proximity cannot fall eventually to give rise to some bond between different families. Young people of the opposite sex live in adjoining Huts, the transient dealings demanded by Nature soon lead to other, no less sweet and more permanent ones as a result of mutual visits. They grow accustomed to attend to different objects and to make comparisons; Imperceptibly they acquire ideas of merit and of beauty that produce sentiments of preference. The more they see one another, the less can they do without seeing one another again. A tender and sweet sentiment steals into the soul, and at the least obstacle becomes an impetuous frenzy, jealousy awakens together with love; Discord triumphs, and the gentlest of the passions receives sacrifices of human blood.
[16] As Ideas and sentiments succeed one another, as the mind and the heart grow active, Mankind continues to grow tame, contacts expand and bonds tighten. It became customary to gather in front of the Huts or around a large Tree: song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement or rather the occupation of idle men and women assembled. Everyone began to look at everyone else and to wish to be looked at himself, and public esteem acquired a value. The one who sang or danced the best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most skillful or the most eloquent came to be the most highly regarded, and this was the first step at once toward inequality and vice: from these first preferences arose vanity and contempt on the one hand, shame and envy on the other; and the ferment caused by these new leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.
[17] Once men had begun to appreciate one another and the idea of esteem had taken shape in their mind, everyone claimed a right to it, and it was no longer possible to deprive anyone of it with impunity. From this arose the first duties of civility even among Savages, and from it any intentional wrong became an affront because, together with the harm resulting from the injury, the offended party saw in it contempt for his person, often more unbearable than the harm itself. Thus everyone punishing the contempt shown him in a manner proportionate to the stock he set by himself, vengeances became terrible, and men bloodthirsty and cruel. This is precisely the stage reached by most of the Savage Peoples known to us; and it is for want of drawing adequate distinctions between Ideas, and noticing how far these Peoples already were from the first state of Nature, that some hastened to conclude that man is naturally cruel and that he needs political order to make him gentle, whereas nothing is as gentle as he in his primitive state when, placed by Nature at equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man, and restricted by instinct and by reason alike to protecting himself against the harm that threatens him, he is restrained by Natural pity from doing anyone harm, as nothing moves him to do so, even after harm has been done to him. For, according to the axiom of the wise Locke, "Where there is no property, there can be no injury."
[18] But it should be noted that beginning Society and the already established relations among men required in them qualities different from those they derived from their primitive constitution; that, since morality was beginning to enter into human Actions and since, before there were Laws, everyone was sole judge and avenger of the offenses he had received, the goodness suited to the pure state of Nature was no longer the goodness suited to nascent Society; that punishments had to become more severe in proportion as the occasions to offend became more frequent, and that the terror of revenge had to take the place of the Laws' restraint. Thus, although men now had less endurance and natural pity had already undergone some modification, this period in the development of human faculties, occupying a just mean between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our amour propre, must have been the happiest and the most lasting epoch. The more one reflects on it, the more one finds that this state was the least subject to revolutions, the best for man (XVI), and that he must have left it only by some fatal accident which, for the sake of the common utility, should never have occurred. The example of the Savages, almost all of whom have been found at this point, seems to confirm that Mankind was made to remain in it forever, that this state is the genuine youth of the World, and that all subsequent progress has been so many steps in appearance toward the perfection of the Individual, and in effect toward the decrepitude of the species.
[19] As long as men were content with their rustic huts, as long as they confined themselves to sewing their clothes of skins with thorns or fish bones, adorning themselves with feathers and shells, painting their bodies different colors, perfecting or embellishing their bows and arrows, carving a few fishing Canoes or a few crude Musical Instruments with sharp stones; in a word, as long as they applied themselves only to tasks a single individual could perform and to arts that did not require the collaboration of several hands, they lived free, healthy, good, and happy as far as they could by their Nature be, and continued to enjoy the gentleness of Independent dealings with one another; but the moment one man needed the help of another; as soon as it was found to be useful for one to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property appeared, work became necessary, and vast forests changed into smiling Fields that had to be watered with the sweat of men, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout and grow together with the harvests.
[20] Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts the invention of which brought about this great revolution. For the Poet it is gold and silver, but for the Philosopher it is iron and wheat that civilized men and ruined Mankind. Indeed, both were unknown to the Savages of America who have therefore always remained Savages; other Peoples even seem to have remained Barbarians as long as they engaged in one of these Arts without the other; and perhaps one of the main reasons why Europe was civilized [policée] if not earlier then at least more continuously and better than the other parts of the world, is that it is both the most abundant in Iron and the most fertile in wheat.
[21] It is very difficult to conjecture how men came to know and to use Iron: for it is not plausible that they imagined on their own extracting ore from the mine and doing what is required to prepare it for smelting, before they knew what would result from doing so. On the other hand, it is even less plausible to attribute this discovery to some accidental fire, as mines are formed only in arid places bare of trees and plants, so that it might seem that Nature had taken precautions to withhold this fatal secret from us. The only remaining alternative, then, is that some extraordinary event, such as a Volcano throwing up molten metal, will have given its Witnesses the idea of Imitating this operation of Nature; even then, they must also be assumed to have had a good deal of courage and foresight to undertake such strenuous labor and to anticipate so far in advance the advantages they might derive from it, which really assumes minds already more skilled than these must have been.
[22] As for agriculture, its principle was known long before its practice was established, and it is scarcely possible that men constantly engaged in drawing their subsistence from trees and plants would not fairly soon have the idea of the ways Nature uses to generate Vegetation; but their industry probably turned in that direction only rather late, either because trees which, together with hunting and fishing, provided their food, did not require their care, or for want of knowing the use of wheat, or for want of implements with which to cultivate it, or for want of anticipating future need, or, finally, for want of means to prevent others from appropriating the fruit of their labor. Once they had become more Industrious, It seems plausible that using sharp stones or pointed sticks they began by cultivating a few vegetables or roots around their Huts, long before they knew how to thresh and grind wheat and had the implements necessary for large-scale cultivation, to say nothing of the fact that, in order to devote oneself to this occupation and sow fields, one has to decide to take an initial loss for the sake of great future gain; a foresight that is very alien to the turn of mind of Savage man who, as I have said, has considerable trouble thinking in the morning of what he will need in the evening.
[23] The Invention of the other arts was therefore necessary to force Mankind to attend to the art of agriculture. As soon as men were needed to smelt and forge iron, others were needed to feed them. The more the number of workers increased, the fewer hands were engaged in providing for the common subsistence, without there being any fewer mouths to consume it; and as some had to have foods in exchange for their iron, the others eventually found the secret of using Iron to Increase foods. From this arose Plowing and agriculture on the one hand, and the art of working metals and multiplying their uses on the other.
[24] From the cultivation of land, its division necessarily followed; and from property, once recognized, the first rules of justice necessarily followed: for in order to render to each his own, each must be able to have something; moreover, as men began to extend their views to the future and all saw that they had some goods to lose, there was no one who did not have to fear reprisal against himself for the wrongs he might do to another. This origin is all the more natural as it is Impossible to conceive the idea of nascent property in any other way than in terms of manual labor: for it is not clear what more than his labor man can put into things he has not made in order to appropriate them. Since labor alone gives the Cultivator the right to the produce of the land he has tilled, it consequently also gives him a right to the land, at least until the harvest, and thus from one year to the next, which, since it makes for continuous possession, is easily transformed Into property. When the Ancients, says Grotius, gave Ceres the title legislatrix and a festival celebrated in her honor the name Thesmophoria, they thereby indicated that the division of land produced a new kind of right. Namely the right of property different from that which follows from the natural Law.
[25] Things in this state could have remained equal if talents had been equal and If, for example, the use of Iron and the consumption of foods had always been exactly balanced; but this proportion, which nothing maintained, was soon upset; the stronger did more work; the more skillful used his work to better advantage; the more ingenious found ways to reduce his labor; the Farmer needed more iron, or the blacksmith more wheat, and although they worked equally, the one earned much while the other had trouble staying alive. This is how natural inequality imperceptibly unfolds together with unequal associations, and the differences between men, developed by their different circumstances, become more perceptible, more permanent in their effects, and begin to exercise a corresponding influence on the fate of Individuals.
[26] Things having reached this point, it is easy to imagine the rest. I shall not pause to describe the successive invention of the other arts, the progress of languages, the testing and exercise of talents, the inequalities of fortune, the use or abuse of Wealth, nor all the details that attend them and which everyone can easily add. I will limit myself to a brief glance at Mankind placed in this new order of things.
[27] Here, then, are all our faculties developed, memory and Imagination in play, amour propre Interested, reason become active, and the mind almost at the limit of the perfection of which it is capable. Here are all natural qualities activated, every man's rank and fate set, not only by the amount of goods and the power to help or to hurt, but also by the mind, beauty, strength or skill, merit or talents, and, since these are the only qualities that could attract consideration, one soon had to have or to affect them; For one's own advantage one had to seem other than one in fact was. To be and to appear became two entirely different things, and from this distinction arose ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that follow in their wake. Looked at in another way, man, who had previously been free and independent, is now so to speak subjugated by a multitude of new needs to the whole of Nature, and especially to those of his kind whose slave he in a sense becomes even by becoming their master; rich, he needs their services; poor, he needs their help, and moderate means do not enable him to do without them. He therefore constantly has to try to interest them in his fate and to make them really or apparently find their own profit in working for his: which makes him deceitful and artful with some, Imperious and harsh with the rest, and places him under the necessity of deceiving all those he needs if he cannot get them to fear him and does not find it in his interest to make himself useful to them. Finally, consuming ambition, the ardent desire to raise one's relative fortune less out of genuine need than in order to place oneself above others, Instills in all men a dark inclination to harm one another, a secret Jealousy that is all the more dangerous as it often assumes the mask of benevolence in order to strike its blow in greater safety: In a word, competition and rivalry on the one hand, conflict of interests on the other, and always the hidden desire to profit at the expense of others; all these evils are the first effect of property, and the inseparable train of nascent Inequality.
[28] Before its representative signs were invented, wealth could scarcely consist in anything other than land and livestock, the only real goods men can possess. Now, once Inheritances had increased in number and size to the point where they covered all the land and all adjoined one another, men could no longer aggrandize themselves except at the expense of others, and the supernumeraries whom weakness or indolence had kept from acquiring an inheritance of their own, grown poor without having lost anything because they alone had not changed while everything around them was changing, were obliged to receive or to seize their subsistence from the hands of the rich; and from this began to arise, In accordance with the different characters of the poor and the rich, domination and subjection, or violence and plunder. The rich, for their part, had scarcely become acquainted with the pleasure of dominating than they disdained all other pleasures, and using their old Slaves to subject new ones, they thought only of subjugating and enslaving their neighbors; like those ravenous wolves which once they have tasted human flesh scorn all other food, and no longer want anything but to devour men.
[29] This is how the most powerful or the most miserable, claiming on the basis of their strength or of their needs a kind of right to others' goods, equivalent, according to them to the right of property, the breakdown of equality was followed by the most frightful disorder: this is how the usurpations of the rich, the Banditry of the Poor, the unbridled passions of all, stifling natural pity and the still weak voice of justice, made men greedy, ambitious, and wicked. A perpetual conflict arose between the right of the stronger and the right of the first occupant, which only ended in fights and murders (XVII). Nascent Society gave way to the most horrible state of war: Humankind, debased and devastated, no longer able to turn back or to renounce its wretched acquisitions, and working only to its shame by the abuse of the faculties that do it honor, brought itself to the brink of ruin.
Shocked by the novelty of the evil, at once rich and miserable, He seeks to escape his wealth, and hates what he had just prayed for.
[30] It is not possible that men should not at last have reflected on such a miserable situation and on the calamities besetting them. The rich, above all, must soon have sensed how disadvantageous to them was a perpetual war of which they alone bore the full cost, and in which everyone risked his life while only some also risked goods. Besides, regardless of their pretexts for their usurpations, they realized well enough that they were only based on a precarious and abusive right, and that since they were acquired solely by force, force could deprive them of them without their having any cause for complaint. Even those whom industriousness alone had enriched could scarcely base their property on better titles. No matter if they said: It is I who built this wall; I earned this plot by my labor. Who set its boundaries for you, they could be answered; and by virtue of what do you lay claim to being paid at our expense for labor we did not impose on you? Do you not know that a great many of your brothers perish or suffer from need of what you have in excess, and that you required the express and unanimous consent of Humankind to appropriate for yourself anything from the common subsistence above and beyond your own? Lacking valid reasons to justify and sufficient strength to defend himself; easily crushing an individual, but himself crushed by gangs of bandits; alone against all, and unable, because of their mutual Jealousies, to unite with his equals against enemies united by the shared hope of plunder, the rich, under the pressure of necessity, at last conceived the most well-considered project ever to enter the human mind; to use even his attackers' forces in his favor, to make his adversaries his defenders, to instill in them other maxims and to give them different institutions, as favorable to himself as natural Right was against him.
[31] To this end, after exhibiting to his neighbors the horror of a situation that armed all of them against one another, that made their possessions as burdensome to them as their needs, and in which no one found safety in either poverty or wealth, he easily invented specious reasons to bring them around to his goal: "Let us unite," he tells them, "to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure for everyone the possession of what belongs to him: Let us Institute rules of Justice and peace to which all are obliged to conform, which make no exception for anyone, and which in a way make up for the vagaries of fortune by subjecting the powerful and the weak alike to mutual duties. In a word, Instead of turning our forces against one another, let us gather them into a supreme power that might govern us according to wise Laws, protect and defend all the members of the association, repulse common enemies, and preserve us in everlasting concord."
[32] Much less than the equivalent of this Discourse was needed to sway crude, easily seduced men who, in any event, had too much business to sort out among themselves to be able to do without arbiters, and too much greed and ambition to be able to do for long without Masters. All ran toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their freedom; for while they had enough reason to sense the advantages of a political establishment, they did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers; those most capable of anticipating the abuses were precisely those who counted on profiting from them, and even the wise saw that they had to make up their mind to sacrifice one part of their freedom to preserve the other, as a wounded man has his arm cut off to save the rest of his Body.
[33] Such was, or must have been, the origin of Society and of Laws, which gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich (XVIII), Irreversibly destroyed natural freedom, forever fixed the Law of property and Inequality, transformed a skillful usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few ambitious men henceforth subjugated the whole of Mankind to labor, servitude and misery. It is easy to see how the establishment of a single Society made the establishment of all the others indispensable, and how, in order to stand up to united forces, it became necessary to unite in turn. Societies, multiplying and expanding rapidly, soon covered the entire face of the earth, and it was no longer possible to find a single comer anywhere in the universe where one might cast off the yoke and withdraw one's head out of the way of the often III-guided sword everyone perpetually saw suspended over it. Civil right having thus become the common rule of the Citizens, the Law of Nature no longer obtained except between different Societies where, under the name of Right of nations, it was tempered by a few tacit conventions in order to make dealings possible and to take the place of natural commiseration which, losing in the relations between one Society and another almost all the force it had in the relations between one man and another, lives on only In a few great Cosmopolitan Souls who cross the imaginary boundaries that separate Peoples and, following the example of the sovereign being that created them, embrace the whole of Mankind in their benevolence.
[34] The Bodies Politic thus remaining in the state of Nature among themselves soon experienced the inconveniences that had forced individuals to leave it, and this state became even more fatal among these great Bodies than it had previously been among the individuals who made them up. From this arose the National Wars, Battles, murders, reprisals that make Nature tremble and shock reason, and all those horrible prejudices that rank the honor of spilling human blood among the virtues. The most decent men learned to count it as one of their duties to slay their kind; in time men were seen to massacre one another by the thousands without knowing why; and more murders were committed in a single day's fighting and more horrors at the capture of a single town than had been committed in the state of Nature for centuries together over the entire face of the earth. Such are the first discernible effects of the division of Mankind into different Societies. Let us return to their Institution.
[35] I know that some have attributed other origins to Political Societies, such as conquest by the more powerful, or the union of the weak; and the choice between these causes does not make a difference to what I want to establish: however, the cause of their origin which I have just given seems to me the most natural for the following reasons: 1. That, in the first case, since the Right of conquest is not a Right, it could not have served as the foundation for any other Right, for the Conqueror and the conquered Peoples always remain in a state of War with one another unless the Nation, restored to full freedom, voluntarily chooses its Victor as its Chief. Until that time, regardless of what may have been the terms of capitulation, as they were based on nothing but violence and are consequently null by this very fact, there can, on this hypothesis, be neither genuine Society, nor Body Politic, nor any Law other than that of the stronger. 2. That, in the second case, the words strong and weak are equivocal; that during the interval that separates the establishment of the Right of property or of the first occupant and the establishment of political Governments, the meaning of these terms is better conveyed by the terms poor and rich, because in fact, prior to the Laws, a man had no other means of subjugating his equals than by attacking their goods or making some of his own over to them. 3. That since the Poor have nothing to lose but their freedom, it would have been a great folly for them to deprive themselves voluntarily of the only good they had left without gaining anything in exchange; that since, on the contrary, the rich are so to speak sensitive in every part of their Goods, it was much easier to harm them, and that they consequently had to take more precautions to protect themselves against harm; and that, finally, it is reasonable to believe that a thing was invented by those to whom It is useful rather than by those to whom it does harm.
[36] Nascent Government did not have a constant and regular form. For a want of Philosophy and of experience only present Inconveniences were noticed, and men gave thought to remedying the others only as they became manifest. Despite all the labors of the wisest Lawgivers, the Political State remained ever imperfect because it was almost a product of chance and because, having begun badly, time revealed its flaws and suggested remedies but could never repair the vices of the Constitution; it was constantly being patched; whereas the thing to do would have been to begin by purging the threshing floor and setting aside all the old materials, as Lycurgus did in Sparta, in order afterwards to erect a good Edifice. Initially Society consisted of but a few general conventions which all individuals pledged to observe, and of which the Community made itself the guarantor toward each one of them. Experience had to show how weak such a constitution was, and how easily lawbreakers could escape conviction or punishment for wrongs of which the Public alone was to be both witness and judge; the Law had to be eluded in a thousand ways, Inconveniences and disorders had to keep multiplying, before it finally occurred to them to entrust the dangerous custody of the public authority to private individuals, and to commit to Magistrates the task of getting the People's deliberations heeded: for to say that the Chiefs were chosen before the confederation was established, and that the Ministers of the Laws existed before the Laws themselves, is an assumption not worthy of serious refutation.
[37] It would be no more reasonable to believe that Peoples Initially threw themselves unconditionally and irrevocably into the arms of an absolute Master, and that the first means of providing for the common security imagined by proud and untamed men was to rush headlong into slavery. Indeed, why did they give themselves superiors if not to defend them against oppression, and to protect their goods, their freedoms and their lives, which are, so to speak, the constitutive elements of their being? Now since the worst that can happen in the relations between one man and another is for one to find himself at the other's discretion, would it not have been against good sense to begin by surrendering into the hands of a Chief the only things they needed his help to preserve? What equivalent could he have offered them for the concession of so fine a Right; and if he had dared to exact it on the pretext of defending them, would he not straightaway have received the answer of the Fable: What more will the enemy do to us? It is therefore incontrovertible, and it is the fundamental maxim of all Political Right, that Peoples gave themselves Chiefs to defend their freedom, and not to enslave them. If he have a Prince, said Pliny to Trajan, it is so that he may preserve us from having a Master.
[38] Politicians propound the same sophisms about the love of freedom that Philosophers propounded about the state of Nature; on the basis of the things they see, they judge of very different things which they have not seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to servitude because of the patience with which the men they have before their eyes bear theirs, not realizing that it is as true of freedom as it is of Innocence and virtue that one appreciates their worth only as long as one enjoys them oneself, and loses the taste for them as soon as they are lost. I know the delights of your Country, said Brasidas to a Satrap who was comparing the life of Sparta with that of Persepolis, but you cannot know the pleasures of mine.
[39] As an untamed Steed bristles its mane, stomps the ground with its hoof, and struggles impetuously at the very approach of the bit, while a trained horse patiently suffers whip and spur, so barbarous man will not bend his head to the yoke which civilized man bears without a murmur, and he prefers the most tempestuous freedom to a tranquil subjection. Man's natural dispositions for or against servitude therefore have to be judged not by the degradation of enslaved Peoples but by the prodigious feats of all free Peoples to guard against oppression. I know that the former do nothing but incessantly boast of the peace and quiet they enjoy in their chains, and that they call the most miserable servitude peace: but when I see the others sacrifice pleasures, rest, wealth, power, and life itself for the sake of preserving this one good which those who have lost it hold in such contempt; when I see Animals born free and abhorring captivity smash their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of completely naked Savages scom European voluptuousness and brave hunger, fire, the sword, and death in order to preserve nothing but their Independence, I feel that it is not for Slaves to reason about freedom.
[40] As for Paternal authority, from which some have derived absolute Government and the whole of Society, without invoking Locke's or Sidney's proofs to the contrary, it suffices to note that nothing in the world is farther from the ferocious spirit of Despotism than the gentleness of this authority which looks more to the advantage of the one who obeys than to the utility of the one who commands; that by the Law of Nature the Father is the Child's master only as long as it needs his assistance, that beyond this point they become equal, and that then the son, perfectly independent of the Father, owes him only respect and not obedience; for gratitude is indeed a duty that ought to be performed, but it is not a right that can be exacted. Instead of saying that civil Society is derived from Paternal power, it should, on the contrary, be said that this power derives its principal force from civil Society: an individual was recognized as the Father of many only once they remained assembled around him; the Father's goods, of which he is genuinely the Master, are the bonds that keep his children dependent on him, and he may give them no more of a share of his estate than is proportional to how well they have deserved of him by constant deference to his wishes. Now subjects, far from being in a position to expect a similar favor from their Despot - since they and everything they possess belong to him as his own, or at least so he claims - are reduced to receiving as a favor whatever portion of their goods he leaves them; he dispenses justice when he despoils them; he dispenses grace when he lets them live.
[41] In continuing thus to examine the facts in the light of Right, the claim that Tyranny was established voluntarily would prove as devoid of substance as of truth, and it would be difficult to show the validity of a contract that obligated only one of the parties, that granted to one side everything and to the other nothing, and that would only prove prejudicial to the one who commits himself. This odious System is very far from being even today that of Wise and good Monarchs, and especially of the Kings of France, as may be seen in various places in their Edicts, and in particular in the following passage of a famous Text published in 1667 in the name and by the orders of Louis XIV. Let it therefore not be said that the Sovereign is not subject to the Laws of his State, since the contrary proposition is a truth of the Right of Nations, which flattery has sometimes challenged, but which good Princes have always defended as a tutelary divinity of their States. How much more legitimate it is to say with the Wise Plato that the perfect felicity of a Kingdom is that a Prince be obeyed by his Subjects, that the Prince obey the Law, and that the Law be upright and always directed to the public good. I will not pause to inquire whether, since freedom is man's noblest faculty, it is not to debase one's Nature, to place oneself at the level of the Beasts enslaved by Instinct, even to offend the Author of one's being, to renounce unconditionally the most precious of all his gifts, if one submits oneself to committing all the crimes he forbids us in order to comply with a ferocious and Insane Master, nor whether this sublime workman ought to be more irritated at seeing his finest work destroyed than at seeing it dishonored. I will ignore, If one wishes, the authority of Barbeyrac who, following Locke, explicitly declares that no one may sell his freedom to the point of submitting to an arbitrary power that treats him according to its fancy: For, he adds, that would be to sell one's very life, of which one is not master. I shall only ask by what Right those who were not afraid to debase themselves to this point could subject their posterity to the same ignominy, and on Its behalf renounce goods which it does not owe to their liberality and without which life itself is a burden to all who are worthy of it?
[42] Pufendorf says that just as one transfers one's goods to another by conventions and Contracts, so too can one divest oneself of one's freedom in favor of someone else. This seems to me to be a very bad argument; for, first of all, the goods I alienate become something altogether foreign to me, and their abuse is a matter of indifference to me; but it is important to me that my freedom not be abused, and I cannot risk becoming the Instrument of a crime without incurring the guilt of the evil I will be forced to commit: Moreover, since the Right of property is only by convention and human Institution, every man can dispose of what he possesses as he pleases: but the same does not hold for the essential Gifts of Nature, such as life and freedom, which everyone is permitted to enjoy and of which it is at least doubtful that one has the Right to divest oneself; in depriving oneself of the one, one debases one's being; in depriving oneself of the other one annihilates it as much as in one lies; and as no temporal good can compensate for life or freedom, it would be an offense against both Nature and reason to renounce them at any price whatsoever. But even if one could alienate one's freedom as one can one's goods, the difference would be very great for Children who enjoy the Father's goods only by the transfer of his right, whereas freedom, since it is a gift they have from Nature in their capacity as human beings, their Parents had no Right to divest them of it, so that just as violence had to be done to Nature in order to establish Slavery, Nature had to be altered in order to perpetuate this Right; And the Jurists who have gravely pronounced that the child of a Slave would be born a Slave have in other words decided that a man would not be born a man.
[43] It therefore seems to me certain not only that Governments did not begin with Arbitrary Power, which is but their corruption, their ultimate stage, and which at last returns them to the sole Law of the stronger for which they initially were the remedy, but also that even if this is how they did begin, Arbitrary Power, being by its Nature illegitimate, cannot have served as the foundation for the Rights of Society nor, consequently, for instituted Inequality.
[44] Without at present entering into the inquiries that still remain to be pursued about the Nature of the fundamental Pact of all Government, I limit myself in following common opinion to considering here the establishment of the Body Politic as a true Contract between the People and the Chiefs it chooses for itself; a Contract by which both Parties obligate themselves to observe the Laws stipulated in it and which form the bonds of their union. The People having, in regard to Social relations, united all their wills into a single one, all the articles this will spells out become so many fundamental Laws that obligate all the members of the State without exception, and one of which regulates the selection and the power of the Magistrates charged with attending to the execution of the other Laws. This power extends to everything that can preserve the Constitution, without going so far as to change it. To it are joined honors that render the Laws and their Ministers respectable and, for the Ministers personally, prerogatives compensating them for the strenuous labors which good administration requires. The Magistrate, for his part, obligates himself to use the power entrusted to him only In conformity with the Intention of the Constituents, to maintain everyone in the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him, and on all occasions to prefer the public utility to his self-interest.
[45] Before experience had shown or knowledge of the human heart had led men to anticipate the inevitable abuses of such a constitution it must have appeared all the better as those charged with attending to its preservation themselves had the greatest interest in its being preserved; for since the Magistracy and its Rights were established only by the fundamental Laws, as soon as these are destroyed, the Magistrates would cease to be legitimate, the People would no longer be bound to obey them, and since it would have been the Law and not the Magistrate that constituted the essence of the State, everyone would by Right revert to his Natural freedom.
[46] If one but paused to reflect about it attentively, this would be confirmed by new reasons, and it would be evident from the Nature of the Contract that it could not be irrevocable: for if there were no superior power capable of guaranteeing the Contracting parties' fidelity or of forcing them to fulfill their reciprocal engagements, the Parties would remain sole judges in their own cause, and each would always have the Right to renounce the Contract whenever it found that the other had violated its terms, or that these terms ceased to suit it. This is the principle on which the Right to abdicate could, it would seem, be founded. Now, considering, as we are doing, only human Institution, if the Magistrate, who has all the power in hand and appropriates to himself all the advantages of the Contract, nevertheless had the right to renounce his authority, then there is all the more reason that the People, who pay for all of the Chiefs' failings, should have the Right to renounce Dependence. But the frightful dissensions, the infinite disorders which this dangerous power would necessarily entail, show more than anything else does how much human Governments needed a more solid basis than reason alone, and how necessary it was for the public tranquility that the divine will intervene to endow the Sovereign authority with a sacred and inviolable character that might deprive subjects of the fatal Right to dispose of it. If Religion had performed only this good for men, it would be enough for them all to have to cherish and adopt it, even with its abuses, since it still spares more blood than fanaticism causes to flow: but let us follow the thread of our hypothesis.
[47] The different forms of Governments owe their origin to the greater or lesser differences among individuals at the time of Institution. Was one man preeminent in power, wealth, or prestige? he alone was elected Magistrate, and the State became Monarchical; if several, nearly equal to one another, surpassed all the others, they were elected together, and there was an Aristocracy; those whose fortunes or talents were less uneven, and who had moved least far from the State of Nature, retained the supreme Administration in common, and formed a Democracy. Time confirmed which one of these forms was the most advantageous to men. Some remained exclusively subject to Laws, the others were soon obeying
Masters. Citizens wanted only to keep their freedom, subjects thought only of depriving their neighbors of theirs because they found it unbearable that others enjoy a good which they themselves no longer enjoyed. In a word, on one side were wealth and Conquests, and on the other happiness and virtue.
[48] In these various Governments all Magistracies were at first Elective; and when Wealth did not prevail, preference was accorded to merit, which confers a Natural Ascendancy, and to age, which confers experience in business and equanimity in deliberations. The Hebrews' elders, Sparta's Gerontes, Rome's Senate, and the very Etymology of our word Seigneur, show how respected Old Age formerly was. The more Elections settled on men of advanced age, the more frequent they became, and the more their cumbersomeness made itself felt; Intrigues arose, factions were formed, the parties grew embittered, civil Wars flared up, at last the blood of Citizens was sacrificed to the supposed happiness of the State, and men were on the verge of relapsing into the Anarchy of former times. The ambition of the most Preeminent men took advantage of these circumstances to perpetuate their offices within their families: The People, already accustomed to dependence, tranquility, and the comforts of life, and already past the State where they could break their chains, consented to let their servitude Increase in order to secure their tranquility, and this is how Chiefs, having become hereditary, grew accustomed to regard their Magistracy as a family possession, to regard themselves as the owners of the State of which they at first were only the Officers, to call their Fellow-Citizens their Slaves, to count them like Cattle among the things that belonged to them, and to call themselves the equals of the Gods and the Kings of Kings.
[49] If we follow the progress of Inequality throughout these different revolutions, we will find that its first stage was establishing the Law and Right of property; the Institution of Magistracy was the second; the conversion of legitimate into arbitrary power the third and last; so that the state of rich and poor was authorized by the first Epoch, that of powerful and weak by the second, and by the third that of Master and Slave, which is the ultimate degree of inequality and the state to which all the others finally lead, until new revolutions either dissolve the Government entirely or bring it closer to legitimate institution.
[50] In order to understand the necessity of this progress one has to consider not so much the motives for the establishment of the Body Politic, as the form it assumes in its implementation, and the inconveniences it entails: for the vices that make social institutions necessary are the same ones that make their abuse inevitable; and since, with the sole exception of Sparta where the Law primarily attended to the Children's education and where Lycurgus established morals that almost spared him having to add Laws to them, Laws, in general less strong than the passions, contain men without changing them; it would be easy to prove that any Government that, without declining or deteriorating, Invariably worked exactly according to the end for which it had been instituted would have been instituted unnecessarily, and a Country where no one eluded the Laws and abused the Magistracy would need neither Magistrates nor Laws.
[51] Political distinctions necessarily bring about civil distinctions. Growing inequality between the People and its Chiefs soon manifests itself among private individuals where it undergoes a thousand modifications according to passions, talents and circumstances. The Magistrate could not usurp illegitimate power without creating clients to whom he is forced to yield some share of it. Besides, Citizens let themselves be oppressed only insofar as they are swept up by blind ambition and, looking more beneath than above themselves, come to hold Domination dearer than independence, and consent to bear chains so that they might impose chains in turn. It is very difficult to reduce to obedience someone who does not seek to command, and the cleverest Politician would never succeed in subjugating men whose only wish was to be Free; but inequality readily spreads among ambitious and pusillanimous souls ever ready to take their chance on fortune, and almost equally prepared to rule or to serve depending on whether fortune favors or foils them. Thus a time must have come when the eyes of the People were so dazzled that their leaders only had to say to the least of men, be Great, you and your entire race, and at once he appeared great in everyone else's eyes as well as in his own, and his Descendants were exalted still further in proportion to their distance from him; the more remote and uncertain the cause, the greater the effect; the more idlers could be counted in a family, the more Illustrious it became.
[52] If this were the place to go into details, I could easily show how, even without the Government's Intervening, Inequality of prestige and authority becomes inevitable among Private Individuals (XIX) as soon as, united in one Society, they are forced to compare themselves one with the other, and to take account of the differences they find in the constant use they have to make of one another. These differences are of several kinds; but since wealth, nobility or rank, Power and personal merit are generally the principal distinctions by which one is measured in Society, I would prove that the concord or conflict between these various forces is the surest indication of a well or a badly constituted State: I would show that of these four sorts of inequality, since personal qualities are the origin of all the others, riches is the last to which they are finally reduced, because, being the most immediately useful to well-being and the easiest to transmit, it can readily be used to buy all the rest. This observation makes it possible to tell rather accurately how far each People has moved from its original institution, and the distance it has traveled toward the ultimate stage of corruption. I would show how much this universal desire for reputation, honors, and preferment which consumes us all exercises and compares talents and strengths, how much it excites and multiplies the passions and, in making all men competitors, rivals, or rather enemies, how many reverses, how many successes, how many catastrophes of every kind it daily causes by leading so many Contenders to enter the same lists: I would show that it is to this ardor to be talked about, to this frenzy to achieve distinction which almost always keeps us outside ourselves, that we owe what is best and what is worst among men, our virtues and our vices, our Sciences and our errors, our Conquerors and our Philosophers, that is to say a multitude of bad things for a small number of good things. Finally, I would prove that if one sees a handful of powerful and rich men at the pinnacle of greatness and fortune while the masses grovel in obscurity and misery, it is because the former value the things they enjoy only to the extent that the others are deprived of them, and, without any change in their own state, they would cease to be happy if the People ceased to be miserable.
[53] But these details alone would provide material for a substantial work that weighed the advantages and inconveniences of any Government relative to the Rights of the state of Nature, and laid bare all the different guises inequality has assumed to this day and may in future Centuries assume according to the Nature of these Governments and to the revolutions time will necessarily bring about in them. One would see the multitude oppressed from within as a consequence of the very precautions it had taken against threats from without; One would see oppression constantly grow without the oppressed ever being able to know what might be its limits or what legitimate means they have left to halt it. One would see the Rights of Citizens and National freedoms die out little by little, and the protests of the weak treated as seditious murmurs. One would see politics restrict the honor of defending the common cause to a mercenary portion of the People: One would see, as a result, taxes become necessary, the discouraged Farmer leave his field even in Peacetime, and abandon his plow to gird on the sword. One would see arise the fatal and bizarre rules regarding the point of honor: One would see the defenders of the Fatherland sooner or later become Its Enemies, forever holding the dagger raised over their fellow-citizens, and a time would come when they would be heard to say to their Country's oppressor
If you order me to plunge the sword into my brother's breast or my father's throat, or even my pregnant wife's womb, I will do so, though my right arm be unwilling.
[54] From the extreme inequality of Conditions and fortunes, from the diversity of passions and talents, from the useless arts, the pernicious arts, the frivolous Sciences, would arise a host of prejudices equally contrary to reason, happiness and virtue; Chiefs would be seen fomenting everything that can weaken assembled men by disuniting them; everything that can give Society an air of apparent concord while sowing a seed of real division in it; everything that can inspire mis- trust and mutual hatred in the different estates by setting their Rights and interests at odds, and so strengthen the Power that contains them all.
[55] It is from the midst this disorder and these revolutions that Despotism, gradually rearing its hideous head and devouring everything good and wholesome it may have noticed anywhere in the State, would finally succeed in trampling the Laws and the People underfoot, and in establishing itself on the ruins of the Republic. The times preceding this final change would be times of troubles and calamities; but in the end everything would be swallowed up by the Monster; and Peoples would no longer have Chiefs or Laws, but only Tyrants. From that moment on there would also no longer be any question of morals and virtue; for wherever Despotism rules, where honesty offers no hope, it suffers no other master, as soon as it speaks, there is no consulting probity or duty, and the blindest obedience is the only virtue left to Slaves.
[56] Here is the last stage of Inequality and the ultimate point that closes the Circle and touches the point from which we set out: This is where all private individuals again become equal because they are nothing and, since the Subjects have no other Law left than the will of the Master nor the Master any other rule than his passions, the notions of the good and the principles of justice again vanish. This is where everything reverts to the sole Law of the stronger and consequently to a new State of Nature, different from that with which we began in that the first was the state of Nature in its purity, whereas this last is the fruit of an excess of corruption. There is, in any event, so little difference between the two states, and the Contract of Government is so utterly dissolved by Despotism, that the Despot is Master only as long as he is the stronger and that as soon as he can be expelled, he cannot object to violence. The uprising that finally strangles or dethrones a Sultan is as lawful an action as those by which, the day before, he disposed of his Subjects' lives and goods. Force alone maintained him, force alone overthrows him; things thus proceed according to the Natural order; and whatever may be the outcome of these brief and frequent revolutions, no one can complain of another's injustice, but only of his own imprudence or misfortune.
[57] In thus discovering and retracing the forgotten and lost paths that must have led man from the Natural state to the Civil state; in restoring, in addition to the intermediate stages I have just indicated, those which the pressure of time made me omit or the imagination failed to suggest to me; every attentive Reader cannot but be struck by the immense distance that separates these two states. It is in this slow succession of things that he will see the solution to an infinite number of problems of ethics and of Politics which Philosophers are unable to solve. He will sense that, since the Mankind of one age is not the Mankind of another age, the reason why Diogenes did not find a man is that he was looking among his contemporaries for the man of a time that was no more: Cato, he will say, perished with Rome and freedom, because he was out of place in his century, and the greatest of men only amazed the world he would have governed five hundred years earlier. In a word, he will explain how the human soul and passions, by imperceptible adulterations so to speak change in Nature; why in the long run the objects of our needs and of our pleasures change; why, as original man gradually vanishes, Society no longer offers to the eyes of the wise man anything but an assemblage of artificial men and factitious passions that are the product of all these new relations, and have no true foundation in Nature. Observation fully confirms what reflection teaches us on this subject: Savage man and civilized man differ so much in their inmost heart and Inclinations that what constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would reduce the other to despair. The first breathes nothing but repose and freedom, he wants only to live and to remain idle, and even the Stoic's ataraxia does not come close to his profound indifference to everything else. By contrast, the Citizen, forever active, sweats, scurries, constantly agonizes in search of ever more strenuous occupations: he works to death, even rushes toward it in order to be in a position to live, or renounces life in order to acquire Immortality. He courts the great whom he hates, and the rich whom he despises; he spares nothing to attain the honor of serving them; he vaingloriously boasts of his baseness and of their protection and, proud of his slavery, he speaks contemptuously of those who have not the honor of sharing it. What a sight the difficult and envied labors of a European Statesman must be for a Carib! How many cruel deaths would not this indolent Savage prefer to the horror of such a life, which is often not even sweetened by the pleasure of doing good? But in order to see the purpose of so many cares, the words, power and reputation, would have to have some meaning in his mind; he would have to learn that there is a sort of men who count how they are looked upon by the rest of the universe for something, who can be happy and content with themselves on the testimony of others rather than on their own. This, Indeed, is the genuine cause of all these differences: the Savage lives within himself; sociable man, always outside himself, is capable of living only in the opinion of others and, so to speak, derives the sentiment of his own existence solely from their judgment. It is not part of my subject to show how such a disposition engenders so much Indifference to good and evil together with such fine discourses on morality; how everything being reduced to appearances, everything becomes contrivance and play-acting: honor, friendship, virtue, and often even vices in which one at length discovers the secret of glorying; how, in a word, forever asking others what we are without ever daring to ask it of ourselves, in the midst of so much Philosophy, humanity, politeness, and Sublime maxims, we have nothing more than a deceiving and frivolous exterior, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. It is enough for me to have proved that this is not man's original state, and that it is solely the spirit of Society together with the Inequality it engenders that changes and corrupts all our natural inclinations this way.
[58] I have tried to show the origin and the progress of Inequality, the establishment and the abuse of political Societies, Insofar as these things can be deduced from the Nature of man by the light of reason alone, and Independently of the sacred Dogmas that endow Sovereign authority with the Sanction of Divine Right. It follows from this account that inequality, being almost nonexistent in the state of Nature, owes its force and growth to the development of our faculties and the progress of the human Mind, and finally becomes stable and legitimate by the establishment of property and Laws. It follows, further, that moral Inequality, authorized by positive right alone, is contrary to Natural Right whenever it is not directly proportional to Physical inequality; a distinction which sufficiently determines what one ought to think in this respect of the sort of inequality that prevails among all civilized Peoples; since it is manifestly against the Law of Nature, however defined, "that a child command an old man, an imbecile lead a wise man, and a handful of people abound in superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities.
Rousseau’s Notes
Epistle Dedicatory (Paragraph 5)
Note I
Herodotus relates that after the murder of the false Smerdis, when the seven liberators of Persia gathered to deliberate about the form of Government they would give the State, Otanes strongly favored a republic; an opinion all the more extraordinary in the mouth of a Satrap because, quite aside from any claim he might have had to the Empire, the great fear more than death any sort of Government that forces them to respect men. Otanes, as might be expected, was not heeded, and seeing that they were going to proceed to the election of a Monarch he, who wanted neither to obey nor to command, freely yielded to the other Contenders his right to the crown, asking in return only that he himself and his posterity be free and independent; which was granted him. Even if Herodotus had not told us the restriction placed on this Privilege, it would necessarily have to be assumed; otherwise Otanes, not recognizing any sort of Law and not having to account to anyone, would have been all-powerful in the State and more powerful than the King himself. But it was scarcely likely that a man capable in a case like this of being satisfied with such a privilege would be capable of abusing it. Indeed, there is no evidence that this right ever caused the least trouble in the Kingdom, either by wise Otanes or by any of his descendants.
Preface (Paragraph 1)
Note II
[1] With the very first step, I confidently rely on one of the authorities Philosophers regard as respectable because they come from a solid and sublime reason which they alone know how to discover and to appreciate.
[2] "However great may be our interest in knowing ourselves, I wonder whether we do not know better everything that is not ourselves. Provided by Nature with organs destined exclusively for our preservation, we use them only to receive foreign impressions, we seek only to spread outward, and to exist outside ourselves; too busy [196] multiplying the functions of our senses and extending the external range of our being, we rarely use that internal sense which reduces us to our true dimensions and separates from us everything that does not belong to it. Yet this is the sense we must use if we wish to know ourselves; it is the only sense by which we can judge ourselves; but how is this sense to be made active and given its full scope? How is our Soul, within which it resides, to be freed of all of our Mind's Illusions? We have lost the habit of using it, it has remained without exercise amidst the riot of our bodily sensations, it has been dried up in the fire of our passions; the heart, the Mind, the senses, everything has worked against it." Histoire Naturelle vol. iv, p. 151, de la Nature de l'homme.
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 1)
Note III
[1] The changes that a long practice of walking on two feet may have produced in man's structure, the similarities that can still be observed between his arms and the Forelegs of Quadrupeds, and the inference drawn from the way they walk, may have given rise to some doubts about which way of walking must have been most natural to us. All children begin by walking on all fours and need our example and lessons to learn to stand upright. There are even Savage Nations, such as the Hottentots, which greatly neglect their Children and let them walk on their hands for so long that later they have a good deal of trouble getting them to straighten up; the children of the Caribs of the Antilles do the same. There are various Instances of Quadruped men, and I could cite among others that of the Child found in 1344 near Hesse where he had been raised by Wolves, and who subsequently said at the Court of Prince Henry that if it had been up to himself alone, he would have preferred to return among them rather than to live among men. He had become so accustomed to walking like those animals, that wood Splints had to be tied to him which forced him to hold himself upright and keep his balance on two feet. The same was true of the Child found in 1694 in the forests of Lithuania, and who lived among Bears. He gave, says M. de Condillac, no sign of reason, walked on his hands and feet, had no language, and made sounds that in no way resembled those of a human being. The little Savage of Hanover who several years ago was brought to the Court of England had all the trouble in the world getting adjusted to walking on two feet, and in 1719 two more Savages were found in the Pyrenees, who roamed the mountains in the manner of quadrupeds. As for the possible objection that this means that we deprive ourselves of the use of the hands, to which we owe so many advantages, quite aside from the fact that the example of the monkeys shows that the hand can very well be used in both ways, it would only prove that man can assign to his limbs a more convenient end than Nature's, and not that Nature destined man to walk otherwise than it teaches him to do.
[2] But there are, it seems to me, much better reasons for holding that man is a biped. First, even if it were shown that he could originally have been structured differently than we see him, and nevertheless eventually become what he is, this would not be reason enough to conclude that this is how it did happen: For before these changes are accepted, it would have to be shown not only that they are possible, but also that they are at least likely. Moreover, while it does seem that man's arms could have served him for Legs in case of need, this is the only observation that lends this system support, as against a great many others that are contrary to it. The principal ones are: that if man had walked on all fours, then the manner in which his head is attached to his body, Instead of directing his gaze horizontally, as does that of all other animals, and as does his own when he walks upright, would have kept his eyes fixed directly on the ground when he walks on all fours, a position scarcely favorable to the preservation of the Individual; that the tall he lacks, and for which he has no use in walking on two feet, is useful to quadrupeds, and that none of them is without it; that the woman's breast, very well placed for a biped holding her child in her arms, is so poorly placed for a quadruped that none has it so placed; that the hindquarters being inordinately high in relation to the forelegs, which is why we drag ourselves around on our knees when we walk on all fours, the whole would have made for an Animal that is poorly proportioned and walks clumsily; that if he had set his foot down flat as he does his hand, he would have had one fewer articulation in his hind leg than other animals have, namely that which joins the Canon bone to the Tibia; and that if he set down only the tip of the foot, as he would probably have been constrained to do, the tarsus, even disregarding the many bones that make it up, would seem to be too big to take the place of the canon, and its Articulations with the Metatarsus and the Tibia too close together to give the human leg in this position the same flexibility as the legs of quadrupeds. The example of Children, taken as it is from an age when natural strengths are not yet developed nor the limbs firm, proves nothing at all, and I would as soon say that dogs are not destined to walk because for several weeks after their birth they only crawl. Moreover, particular facts are of little force against the universal practice of all men, even of those from Nations which, since they had no communication with the others, could not have imitated them in anything. A Child abandoned in some forest before it could walk, and raised by some beast, will have followed its Nurse's example by learning to walk as she does; it could have acquired through habit a dexterity it did not get from Nature; and as One-armed people succeed by dint of practice to do with their feet everything we do with our hands, so will it finally have succeeded in using its hands as feet.
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 3)
Note IV
[1] Should there be among my Readers so poor a Physicist as to raise objections against me regarding this assumption of the natural fertility of the earth, I will respond to him with the following passage.
[2] "Since plants draw much more substance for their nourishment from air and water than they do from the earth, it happens that when they decay they restore more to the earth than they had drawn from it; besides, a forest regulates rainwater by preventing evaporation. Thus, in a woods left untouched for a long time, the layer of earth that supports vegetation would Increase considerably; but since Animals restore less to the earth than they take from it, and men consume enormous quantities of wood and plants for fire and other uses, it follows that in an inhabited country the layer of topsoil must invariably decrease and eventually become like the ground of Arabia Petraea and so many other Provinces of the Orient which, indeed, is the oldest inhabited Clime, and where only Salt and Sand are now found; for the fixed Salt of Plants and of Animals remains, while all their other parts are volatilized." M. De Buffon, Histoire naturelle.
[3] To this may be added the factual proof of the great number of trees and of plants of all kinds that filled almost all the desert islands discovered in recent centuries, and of what history tells us about the huge forests that had to be cut down everywhere on earth as it was populated or civilized. I will make the following three additional remarks on this subject. The first is that, if there is a kind of vegetation that could compensate for the depletion of vegetable matter which, according to M. de Buffon's reasoning, is due to animals, then it is mainly woods, the crowns and leaves of which collect and absorb more water and moisture than do other plants. The second is that the destruction of topsoil, that is to say the loss of the substance suited to vegetation, must accelerate in proportion as the earth is more cultivated and as its more industrious inhabitants consume its various productions in greater quantities. My third and most important remark is that the fruits of Trees provide animals with a more abundant supply of food than can other vegetation, an experiment I myself performed by comparing the production of two plots equal in size and quality, the one covered with chestnut trees, and the other sown with wheat.
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 3)
Note V
[1] Among the Quadrupeds the two most universal distinguishing features of the carnivorous species are drawn from the shape of the Teeth, and the conformation of the Intestines. The Animals that live exclusively off vegetation all have blunt teeth, like the Horse, the Ox, the Sheep, the Hare; but the Carnivores have them pointed, like the Cat, the Dog, the Wolf, the Fox. As for Intestines, Frugivorous Animals have some, such as the Colon, that are not found among carnivorous Animals. It therefore seems that Man, whose Teeth and Intestines are like those of the Frugivorous Animals, should naturally be placed in that Class, and this opinion is confirmed not only by anatomical observations: but the records of Antiquity also lend it considerable support. "Dicaearchus," says St. Jerome, "relates in his Books on Greek Antiquities that during the reign of Saturn, when the Earth was still fertile on its own, no man ate Flesh, but all lived off the Fruits and the Vegetables that grew naturally" (Bk. 11, Adversus Jovianum) It is evident from this that I forgo many advantages of which I could avail myself. For since prey is almost the only object about which Carnivores fight, and Frugivores live in constant peace with one another, it is clear that if the human species were of the latter kind it could have subsisted much more easily in the state of Nature, and would have had much less need and many fewer occasions to leave it.
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 5)
Note VI
[1] All knowledge requiring reflection, all Knowledge acquired only from chains of ideas and perfected only successively, seems to be altogether beyond the reach of Savage man for want of communication with his kind, that is to say for want of the instrument used in such communication, and of the needs that make it necessary. His knowledge and efforts are restricted to jumping, running, fighting, throwing a stone, climbing a tree. But while these are the only things he knows, he, in turn, knows them much better than do we who have not the same need of them as has he; and since these activities depend exclusively on the use of the Body and cannot be communicated or improved from one individual to the next, the first man could have been just as skilled at them as his most remote descendants.
[2] The reports of travelers are filled with examples of the strength and vigor of men from the barbarous and Savage Nations; they praise their skill and agility almost as much; and since it takes only eyes to observe these things, there is no reason not to trust what eyewitnesses report on this score. I draw some examples at random from the first books that come to hand.
[3] "The Hottentots," says Kolben, "are better at fishing than the Europeans of the Cape. They are equally skilled with net, hook and spear, in bays as in rivers. They are no less skillful at catching fish by hand. They are incomparably adept at swimming. Their way of swimming is somewhat surprising and altogether peculiar to them. They swim with their body upright and their hands stretched out of the water, so that they seem to be walking on land. In the most turbulent sea, when the waves crest like so many mountains, they dance as it were on the tops of the waves, rising and falling like a piece of cork."
[4] "The Hottentots," the same Author further says, "are surprisingly skilled hunters, and how light they are on their feet passes the imagination." He is surprised at their not more frequently putting their skill to bad use, although they do sometimes do so, as may be judged from the example he gives of it. "A Dutch sailor coming ashore at the Cape," he says, "asked a Hottentot to follow him into Town with a roll of tobacco weighing about twenty pounds. When they both were at some distance from the Crew, the Hottentot asked the Sailor whether he could run. Run, the Dutchman answers, yes, very well. Let us see, replies the African, and escaping with the tobacco, he disappeared almost instantly. The Sailor, dumbfounded by such marvelous speed, gave no thought to pursuing him, and never again saw either his tobacco or his porter.
[5] "They are so quick of eye and sure of hand that Europeans do not even come close to them. At a hundred paces they will hit a target the size of a half-penny with a stone, and what is most surprising is that instead of fixing their eyes on the target as do we, they make constant movements and contortions. Their stone is as if carried by an invisible hand."
[6] Father du Tertre says about the Savages of the Antilles more or less the same things that have just been read about the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope. He mainly praises the accuracy of their shooting with their arrows birds on the wing and swimming fish, which they then retrieve by diving. The Savages of North America are no less renowned for their strength and skill: and here is an example by which to judge of the strength and skill of the Indians of South America.
[7] In the year 1746, an Indian from Buenos Aires, having been sentenced to the Galleys in Cadiz, proposed to the Governor to buy back his freedom by risking his life at a public festival. He promised to tackle the fiercest Bull single-handed and armed with only a rope, bring it low, grapple it with his rope by any part of the body he would be told, saddle it, bridle it, ride it, fight thus mounted two more of the fiercest Bulls brought from the Torillo, and put them all [201] to death one after the other the moment he was ordered to do so, all without anyone's help; which was granted him. The Indian kept his word and succeeded in everything he had promised; for the way in which he went about it, and the full details of the fight, one can consult the first Volume in 12° of the Observations sur l'histoire naturelle by M. Gautier, p. 262, from which this fact is taken.
Discourse (Part 1 Paragraph 8)
Note VII
[1] "The life-span of Horses" says M. de Buffon, "Is, as in all other animal species, proportional to the duration of their growth. Man, who takes fourteen years to grow, may live six or seven times that long, that is to say ninety or a hundred years: The Horse, whose growth is completed in four years, may live six or seven times that long, that is to say twenty-five or thirty years. Possible counter-examples to this rule are so rare that they should not even be regarded as exceptions from which to draw conclusions; and since draught horses reach their full size in less time than do riding horses, they also live less long and are old by the time they have reached the age of fifteen."
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 8)
Note VIII
[1] I believe I see between carnivorous and frugivorous animals another still more general difference than the one I mentioned in Note v, since it applies to birds as well. This difference consists in the number of young, which never exceeds two to a litter in species that live exclusively off vegetation, and generally exceeds that number for carnivorous animals. It is easy to know Nature's aim in this regard by the number of teats, which is only two in every female of the first species, like the Mare, the Cow, the Goat, the Doe, the Ewe, etc., and is always six or eight in the other females, like the Dog, the Cat, the she-Wolf, the Tigress, etc. The Hen, the Goose, the Duck, all of which are carnivorous Birds, as well as the Eagle, the Sparrow-hawk, the Barn-owl, also lay and hatch a great many eggs, which is never the case with the Pigeon, the Dove, or the Birds that eat absolutely nothing but grain, and generally lay and hatch no more than two eggs at a time. The reason that may account for this difference is that the animals living only off grasses and plants, since they spend almost all day grazing and are forced to spend much time feeding themselves, could not properly suckle many young. whereas carnivores, since they take their meal almost in an instant, can more easily and more frequently return both to their young and to their hunt, and repair the dissipation of such a large quantity of Milk. All this calls for many particular observations and reflections; but this is not the place for them, and it is enough for me to have shown the most general System of Nature in this part, a System which provides a new reason for removing man from the Class of carnivorous animals and placing him among the frugivorous species.
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 17)
Note IX
[1] A famous Author, calculating the goods and evils of human life and comparing the two sums, found the last greatly exceeded the first and that, all things considered, life was a rather poor gift for man. I am not at all surprised by his conclusion; he drew all his arguments from the constitution of Civil man: If he had gone back to Natural man, it is likely that he would have reached very different results, that he would have noticed that man suffers scarcely any evils other than those he has brought on himself, and that Nature would have been justified. It is not without difficulty that we have succeeded in making ourselves so miserable. When, on the one hand, one considers men's tremendous labors, so many Sciences Investigated, so many arts invented, so many forces employed; chasms filled, mountains leveled, rocks split, rivers made navigable, lands cleared, lakes dug, swamps drained, huge buildings erected on land, the sea covered with Ships and Sailors; and when, on the other hand, one inquires with a little meditation into the true advantages that have resulted from all this for the happiness of the human species; one cannot help being struck by the astonishing disproportion between these things, and deplore man's blindness which, in order to feed his insane pride and I know not what vain self-admiration, causes him eagerly to run after all the miseries to which he is subject and which beneficent Nature had taken care to keep from him.
[2] Men are wicked; a sad and constant experience makes proof unnecessary; yet man is naturally good, I believe I have demonstrated it; what, then, can have depraved him to this extent, if not the changes his constitution has undergone, the progress he has made and the knowledge he has acquired? Let human Society be ever so much admired, it remains nonetheless true that it necessarily moves men to hate one another in proportion as their interests clash, to render one another apparent services and in effect to do one another every imaginable harm. What is one to think of dealings in which every private person's reason dictates to him maxims directly contrary to those the public reason preaches to the body of Society, and in which everyone profits from the others' misfortune? There is perhaps not a single well-to-do person whom greedy heirs and often his own children do not secretly wish dead; not a Ship at Sea whose wreck would not be good news to some Merchant; "not a single commercial house which a dishonest debtor would not like to see burn together with all the papers it contains; not a single People that does not rejoice at its neighbors' disasters. This is how we find our advantage in what harms our kind, and how one person's loss almost always makes for another's prosperity; but what is more dangerous still is that a host of private individuals walt and hope for public calamities. Some wish for illnesses, others for death, others for war, others for famine; I have seen horrible men weep in sorrow at the prospects of a good harvest, and the great and deadly London fire that cost so many unfortunates their lives or their belongings made perhaps more than ten thousand people's fortune. I know that Montaigne blames the Athenian Demades for having had a Workman punished who, by selling coffins very dear, profited greatly from the death of Citizens: But the reason Montaigne adduces, that everyone would have to be punished, clearly confirms my own. Let us therefore see through our frivolous displays of goodwill to what goes on in the recesses of men's hearts, and reflect on what must be the state of things in which all men are forced to flatter and to destroy one another, and in which they are born enemies by duty and knaves by interest. If I am answered that Society is so constituted that every man gains by serving the rest, I will reply that this would all be very well if he did not gain even more by harming them. There is no profit, however legitimate, that is not exceeded by the profit to be made illegitimately, and the wrong done a neighbor is always more lucrative than any services. It therefore only remains to find ways to ensure one's impunity, and this is the end to which the powerful bend all their strength and the weak all their cunning.
[3] Savage man, once he has supped, is at peace with all of Nature and a friend to all of his kind. Must he sometimes contend for his meal? He never comes to blows without first having compared the difficulty of prevailing with that of finding his subsistence elsewhere; and since pride has no share in the fight, it ends with a few fisticuffs; the victor eats, the vanquished goes off in quest of his luck, and all is at peace: but with man in Society it is all a very different business; first necessities have to be provided for, and then superfluities; next come delicacies, and then immense wealth, and then subjects, and then Slaves; he has not a moment's respite; what is most singular is that the less natural and urgent the needs, the more the passions Increase and, what is worse, so does the power to satisfy them; so that after long periods of prosperity, after having swallowed up a good many treasures and ruined a good many men, my Hero will end up by cutting every throat until he is sole master of the Universe. Such, In brief, is the moral picture if not of human life, at least of the secret aspirations of every Civilized man's heart.
[4] Compare without prejudices the state of Civil man with that of Savage man, and determine, if you can, how many new doors in addition to his wickedness, his needs, and his miseries, the first has opened to pain and to death. If you consider the mental troubles that consume us, the violent passions that exhaust and waste us, the excessive labors that overburden the poor, the even more dangerous softness to which the rich abandon themselves, and cause the first to die of their needs and the others of their excesses. If you think of the monstrous combinations of foods, their noxious seasonings, the spoiled supplies, the adulterated drugs, the villainies of those who sell them, the mistakes of those who administer them, the "poisonous Vessels in which they are prepared; if you attend to the epidemics bred by the bad air wherever large numbers of men are gathered together, of the epidemics occasioned by the delicacy of our way of living. by the to and fro between indoors and out, by the use of clothes put on or taken off with too few precautions, and by all the cares which our excessive sensuality has turned into necessary habits and which it then costs us our life or our health to neglect or to be deprived of altogether; if you take into account the fires and the earthquakes that consume or raze entire Cities, killing their inhabitants by the thousands; in a word, if you add up the dangers which all of these causes continually gather over our heads, you will sense how dearly Nature makes us pay for the contempt we have shown for its lessons.
[5] I will not repeat here what I have said elsewhere about war, but I do wish Informed people were willing or daring enough for once to tell the public in detail about the horrors committed in armies by the Suppliers of food and Purveyors of medical supplies; their none-too-secret maneuvers, by which the most brilliant armies fade into less than nothing, would be seen to cause the death of more Soldiers than are mowed down by the enemy's sword; another and no less astonishing calculation is to reckon how many men are yearly swallowed up by the sea as a result of hunger, or scurvy, or Pirates, or fire, or shipwrecks. It is obvious that established property and hence Society must also be held accountable for the murders, poisonings, highway robberies, and even for the punishments of these crimes, punishments necessary in order to prevent greater evils but that, by making the murder of one man cost the lives of two or more, do nevertheless really double the loss to the human species. How many shameful ways there are to prevent the birth of human beings and to cheat Nature: Either by those brutal and depraved tastes that insult its most charming work, tastes which neither Savages nor animals ever knew, and which in civilized countries have arisen only from a corrupt imagination; or by those secret abortions, worthy fruits of debauchery and of a vicious honor, or by the exposure or murder of large numbers of children, the victims of their parents' poverty or their Mothers' barbarous shame; or, finally, by the mutilation of the unfortunates who have a portion of their existence and their entire posterity sacrificed to vain songs or, worse still, to the brutal jealousy of a few men: A mutilation which, in this last case, doubly outrages Nature, in the treatment inflicted on those who suffer it, and in the use to which they are intended.
[6] What if I undertook to show the human species assaulted at its very source and even in the most sacred of all ties, ties regarding which one no longer dares to heed Nature until after one has consulted fortune, and with respect to which civil disorder so jumbles virtues and vices that continence becomes a criminal precaution and the refusal to give life to another human being an act of humanity? But without tearing away the veil that covers so many horrors, let us leave it at pointing out the evil for which others must provide the remedies.
[7] Add to all this the many unhealthy trades that shorten life or ruin one's constitution; such as labor in mines, the various ways of mining metals and minerals, especially Lead, Copper, Mercury, Cobalt, Arsenic, Realgar; those other perilous trades that daily cost many workers' lives, some of them Roofers, others Carpenters, others Masons, others working in quarries; add up all of these considerations, I say, and you will find in the establishment and the perfection of Societies the reasons for the decline of the species that has been noted by more than one Philosopher.
[8] Luxury, Impossible to prevent among men greedy for their own comfort and other men's consideration, soon completes the evil Societies had begun, and, on the pretext of providing a livelihood for the poor who should never have been made so in the first place, it impoverishes everyone else and sooner or later depopulates the State.
[9] Luxury is a remedy much worse than the evil it claims to cure; or rather, it is itself the worst of all evils in any State, large or small, and which, in order to feed the hosts of Lackeys and of poverty-ridden people it has created, oppresses and ruins both farmer and Citizen; Like those scorching south winds which, blanketing grass and foliage with all-devouring Insects, deprive useful animals of their subsistence, and carry famine and death wherever they make themselves felt.
[10] From Society and the luxury it engenders arise the liberal and the mechanical Arts, Commerce, Letters; and all those useless things that cause industry to flourish, and enrich and ruin States. The reason for this decline is very simple. It is easy to see that agriculture must, by its nature, be the least lucrative of all the arts; for since the use of its product is the most indispensable to all men, its price must be proportioned to the poorest men's means. From this same principle the following rule may be derived, that in general the Arts are lucrative in Inverse proportion to their usefulness, and that those that are most needed must in the end become the most neglected. Which shows what one should think regarding the true advantages of Industry and the real effect that results from its progress.
[11] Such are the perceptible causes of all the miseries into which opulence in the end plunges the most admired Nations. As Industry and the arts spread and flourish, the scorned farmer, weighed down by taxes needed to support Luxury, and condemned to spend his life between labor and hunger, abandons his fields to go seek in the Cities the bread he should be bringing to them. The more capital cities strike the stupid eyes of the People as admirable, the more must one bemoan seeing the Countryside abandoned, the fields lle fallow, and the highways overrun by unfortunate Citizens turned beggars or thieves and destined someday to end their misery on the rack or a dunghill. This is how the State, while it grows rich on the one hand, gets weak and depopulated on the other, and how the most powerful Monarchies, after much labor to grow opulent and become deserted, end up the prey of the poor Nations that succumb to the fatal temptation to invade them, and grow rich and weak in their turn, until they are themselves invaded and destroyed by others.
[12] Let someone deign to explain to us for once what could have produced those swarms of Barbarians that for so many centuries swept over Europe, Asia, and Africa? Was it to the quality of their Arts, the Wisdom of their Laws, the excellence of their polity, that they owed this prodigious population? Let our learned men kindly tell us why. Instead of multiplying to such an extent, these ferocious and brutal men, lacking enlightenment, lacking restraints, lacking education, were not forever killing each other off over their pastures or their hunting grounds? Let them explain to us how these miserable people could have had the audacity to so much as look in the eye of such clever people as we ourselves were, with such fine military discipline, such fine Codes and such wise Laws? Finally, why is it that, ever since Society was perfected in the countries of the North and they went to such trouble there to teach men their mutual duties and the art of living together pleasantly and peacefully, they are no longer seen to bring forth anything like the great numbers of men they used to produce? I rather fear that it might finally occur to someone to answer me that all these great things, to wit the Arts, the Sciences, and the Laws, were most Wisely invented by men as a Salutary plague to prevent the excessive increase of the species, for fear that this world, which is destined for us, might in the end become too small for its inhabitants.
[13] What, then? Should Societies be destroyed, thine and mine annihilated, and men return to live in forests with the Bears? A conclusion in the style of my adversaries, which I would rather anticipate than leave them the shame of drawing It. O you, to whom the celestial voice has not made itself heard and who recognize no other destination for your species than to end this short life in peace; you who are able to leave behind you in the Cities your fatal acquisitions; your restless minds, your corrupted hearts, and your unbridled desires; resume your ancient and first innocence since it is in your power to do so; go into the woods to lose the sight and the memory of your contemporaries' crimes, and do not fear that you are debasing your species when you renounce its enlightenment in order to renounce its vices. As for men like myself, whose passions have forever destroyed their original simplicity, who can no longer subsist on grass and acorns, nor do without Laws or Chiefs; Those who were honored in their first Father with supernatural lessons; those who will see in the intention of giving to human actions from the first a morality which they would not have acquired for a long time, the reason for a precept indifferent in itself and Inexplicable in any other System: Those, in a word, who are convinced that the divine voice called all Mankind to the enlightenment and the happiness of the celestial Intelligences; all of them will try. by practicing the virtues they obligate themselves to perform as they learn to know them, to deserve the eternal prize they must expect for it; they will respect the sacred bonds of the Societies of which they are members; they will love their kind and serve them with all their power; they will scrupulously obey the Laws and the men who are their Authors and their Ministers; they will honor above all the good and wise Princes who will know how to forestall, cure, and palliate the host of abuses and of evils that are forever ready to overwhelm us; They will animate the zeal of these worthy Chiefs by showing them, without fear or flattery, the grandeur of their task and the rigor of their duty, But they will nonetheless disdain a constitution that can be maintained only with the help of so many respectable people more often wished for than available, and from which, in spite of all their cares, there always arise more real calamities than apparent advantages.
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 18)
Note X
[1] Among the men we know, either on our own, or from Historians, or from travelers; some are black, others white, others red; some wear their hair long, others have nothing but curly wool; some are almost entirely covered with hair, others do not even have a beard; there have been, and perhaps there still are, Nations of men of gigantic size; and, leaving aside the fable about Pygmies which may well be no more than an exaggeration, the Laplanders and especially the Greenlanders are known to be well below the average size for man; it is even claimed that there are entire Peoples with tails like quadrupeds; and, without placing blind faith in the accounts of Herodotus and of Ctesias, one can at least draw the following very plausible conclusion from them, that, if good observations had been possible in those ancient times when different peoples differed in their ways of life more than they do today, much more striking varieties in shape and bearing would also have been noted among them. All these facts, of which it is easy to provide incontrovertible proofs, can surprise only those who are in the habit of looking exclusively at what is right around them and who are Ignorant of the powerful effects of differences in Climates, air, foods, ways of life, habits in general and, above all, of the astonishing force of uniform causes acting continuously over long successions of generations. Nowadays, when commerce, Travels and conquests bring different Peoples closer together, and their ways of life grow constantly more alike as a result of frequent communication, certain national differences have decreased perceptibly and, for example, everyone can see that present-day Frenchmen are no longer the tall, fair-skinned and blond-haired bodies described by Latin Historians, although time, together with the admixture of Franks and Normans who are themselves fair and blond, should have made up for whatever the contact with the Romans may have taken away from the influence of the Climate on the population's natural constitution and complexion. All these observations about the varieties which a thousand causes may and indeed have produced in the human Species, lead me to wonder whether various animals similar to men, which travelers have without much observation taken for Beasts, either because of some differences they noticed in their outward conformation, or merely because these Animals did not speak, might not indeed be genuine Savage men whose race, dispersed in the woods in ancient times, had had no occasion to develop any of its virtual faculties, had not acquired any degree of perfection, and was still in the primitive state of Nature. Let us give an example of what I mean.
[2] "In the Kingdom of the Congo," says "the translator of the Histoire des Voyages, "are found many of those big Animals called Orang-Outangs in the East Indies, which occupy something like a middle position between the human species and the Baboons. Battel relates that in the forests of Mayomba, in the Kingdom of Loango, two kinds of Monsters are found, the larger of which are called Pongos, and the others Enjokos. The first bear an exact resemblance to man; but they are much heavier and quite tall. They have a human face, with very deep-set eyes. Their hands, cheeks, and ears are hairless, except for their rather long eyebrows. Although the rest of their body is rather hairy, this body hair does not grow especially dense and is of a dunnish color. Finally, the only feature that distinguishes them from human beings is their leg, which is without a calf. They walk upright, with the hand holding one another by the hair of the Neck; they live in the woods; They sleep In Trees where they build themselves a kind of roof that shields them from the rain. Their food is fruit or Wild nuts. They never eat flesh. The Negroes who travel through the forests are in the habit of lighting fires at night. They notice that in the morning, when they have left, the Pongos take their place around the fire, and do not leave it until it has died out: for although they are very dexterous, they have not sense enough to keep the fire going by adding wood to it.
[3] "Sometimes they walk in troops and kill the Negroes making their way through the forests. They even attack elephants that come to graze in the places where they live, and make it so uncomfortable for them by striking them with their fists or with sticks that they force them to run away roaring. Pongos are never taken alive; because they are so sturdy that ten men would not be enough to stop them: But the Negroes do take many of their Young after having killed the Mother to whose Body the little one clings fast: when one of these Animals dies, the others cover its body with a Heap of branches or boughs. Purchas adds that in the conversations he had had with Battel, he learned from him that a Pongo had kidnapped a little Negro from him, who spent a whole month in the Society of these Animals; For they do no harm whatsoever to the human beings they surprise, at least not when they do not stare at them, as the little Negro had observed. Battel did not describe the second species of monster.
[4] "Dapper confirms that the Kingdom of the Congo is full of the animals which in the Indies are called Orang-Outangs, that is to say inhabitants of the woods, and Quojas-Morros by the Africans. This Beast, he says, is so similar to man that it has entered the mind of some travelers that it might have been the offspring of a woman and a monkey: a chimera dismissed even by the Negroes. One of these animals was brought from the Congo to Holland and presented to Prince Frederick-Henry of Orange. It was as tall as a three-Year old Child and of moderate girth, but square and well-proportioned, quite agile and quite lively; its legs fleshy and sturdy, the front of its body bare, but the back covered with black hair. At first sight its face resembled that of a man, but its nose was flat and snubbed; its ears, too, were those of the human Species; its breast, for it was a female, was plump, its navel deep-set, its shoulders nicely articulated, its hands divided into fingers and thumbs, its calves and heels fat and fleshy. It often walked upright on its legs, it could lift and carry rather heavy loads. When it wanted to drink it took the cover of the pot with one hand and held the bottom with the other. Afterwards it gracefully wiped its lips. It lay down to sleep, its head on a Pillow, covering itself so skillfully that it might have been mistaken for a human being in bed. The Negroes tell strange tales about this animal. They maintain not only that it takes women and girls by force, but that it dares to attack armed men; in a word, it is quite likely that it is the Satyr of the Ancients. These are perhaps the very animals to which Merolla refers when he relates that the Negroes some- times capture Savage men and women in their hunts."
[5] These species of Anthropomorphic animals are also mentioned in the third volume of the same Histoire des Voyages under the names Beggos and Mandrills, but restricting ourselves to the preceding accounts, one finds in the description of these supposed monsters striking conformities with the human species, and smaller differences than might be pointed to between one human being and another. It is not clear from these passages what the Authors' reasons are for refusing to call the Animals in question Savage men, but it is easy to conjecture that it is because of their stupidity, and also because they did not speak; weak reasons for those who know that, although the organ of speech is natural to man, speech Itself is nevertheless not natural to him, and who recognize the extent to which his perfectibility may have raised Civil man above his original state. The small number of lines comprising these descriptions enables us to judge how poorly these Animals have been observed, and with what prejudices they were seen. For example, they are characterized as monsters, and yet it is conceded that they reproduce. In one place Battel says that the Pongos kill the Negroes traveling through the forest, in another place Purchas adds that they do them no harm even when they surprise them; at least not when the Negroes do not insist on staring at them. The Pongos gather around the fires lit by the Negroes once they have left, and they leave in turn once the fire has died out, that is the fact; here, now, is the observer's commentary: For although they are very dexterous, they have not sense enough to keep the fire going by adding wood to it. I should like to fathom how Battel, or Purchas, his complier, could have known that the Pongos' departure was an effect of their stupidity rather than of their will. In a Climate such as that of Loango, fire is not something Animals particularly need, and if Negroes light them, they do so less against the cold than to frighten ferocious beasts; it is therefore perfectly plain that after having been cheered by the flames for a while or having thoroughly warmed up, the Pongos weary of always staying in one place, and go off to forage, which requires more time than if they ate flesh. Besides, most animals, not excepting man, are known to be naturally lazy, and shun every kind of care that is not absolutely necessary. Finally, it seems very strange that the Pongos, whose dexterity and strength is extolled, the Pongos who know how to bury their dead and how to make themselves roofs out of branches, should not know how to push embers into a fire. I remember having seen a monkey perform the same operation which it is claimed the Pongos cannot perform; it is true that, as my Ideas were not at the time turned in this direction, I myself committed the mistake for which I blame our travelers, and I neglected to examine whether it had indeed been the monkey's intention to keep the fire going, or whether it had simply been, as I believe, to imitate the action of a human being. Be that as it may; it is well demonstrated that the Monkey is not a variety of man; not only because it is deprived of the faculty of speech, but especially because it is certain that this species lacks the faculty of perfecting itself which is the specific characteristic of the human species. Experiments seem not to have been conducted sufficiently carefully with the Pongo and the Orang-Outang to allow the same conclusion to be drawn regarding them. However, if the Orang-Outang or others did belong to the human species, there would be one way in which the crudest observers could satisfy themselves on this question even with a demonstration; but not only would a single generation not suffice for this experiment, it must also be regarded as impracticable because what is but an assumption would have to have been demonstrated as true before the test to confirm the fact could be tried in innocence.
[6] Judgments that are hasty and not the fruit of an enlightened reason, are liable to run to extremes. Our travelers do not hesitate to make beasts by the name of Pongos, Mandrills, Orang-Outangs of the same beings which the Ancients made into Divinities by the name of Satyrs, Fauns, and Sylvans. Perhaps after more accurate Inquiries it will be found that they are neither beasts nor gods, but men. In the meantime it seems to me quite as reasonable to rely in this matter on Merolla, a learned Cleric, an eyewitness, and a man who, for all his naïvete, was intelligent, as on the Merchant Battel, on Dapper, on Purchas and the other Compilers.
[7] What is likely to have been such Observers' Judgment of the Child found in 1694, of whom I have already spoken above, who gave no sign of reason, walked on his hands and feet, had no language, and formed sounds in no way resembling those of a human being. It took him a long time, continues the same Philosopher who provides me with this fact, before he could utter a few words, and then he did so in a barbarous manner. As soon as he could speak, he was questioned about his first state, but he no more remembered it than we remember what happened to us in the Cradle. If, unfortunately for him, this child had fallen into our travelers' hands, there can be no doubt that after taking note of his silence and stupidity, they would have decided to send him back into the woods or to lock him up in a Menagerie; after which they would have spoken about him learnedly in fine reports as a most curious Beast that rather resembled a man.
[8] Although the inhabitants of Europe have for the past three or four hundred years flooded the other parts of the world and are constantly publishing new collections of travels and reports, I am convinced that the only men we know are the Europeans; what is more, it would seem that, judging by the ridiculous prejudices that have not died out even among Men of Letters, very nearly all anyone does under the pompous heading of the study of man is to study the men of his country. While individuals may come and go, it would seem that Philosophy does not travel, and indeed each People's Philosophy is little-suited for another. It is clear why this should be so, at least with respect to faraway places: there are scarcely more than four sorts of men who make extended journeys: Sailors, Merchants, Soldiers and Missionaries. Now it is scarcely to be expected that the first three Classes would provide good Observers, and as for those in the fourth, even If they are not subject to the same prejudices of station as all the others are, one has to believe that, absorbed by the sublime vocation that calls them, they would not readily engage in Inquiries that appear to be matters of pure curiosity and would distract them from the labors to which they have dedicated themselves. Besides, to preach the Gospel usefully requires only zeal and God grants the rest; but to study men requires talents which God does not commit himself to grant to anyone, and which are not always the lot of Saints. One cannot open a travel book without coming across descriptions of characters and morals; yet one is utterly surprised to find in them that these people who have described so many things have said only what everybody already knew, that all they were able to perceive at the other end of the world is what they could perfectly well have observed without leaving their street, and that the telling traits that differentiate Nations and strike eyes made to see have almost always escaped theirs. Hence that fine adage of ethics so much harped on by the ruck of Philosophasters, that men are everywhere the same, that, since they everywhere have the same passions and the same vices, it is quite useless to seek to characterize different Peoples; which is about as well reasoned as it would be to say that it is impossible to distinguish between Peter and James because both have a nose, a mouth, and eyes.
[9] Shall we never see reborn the happy times when Peoples did not pretend to Philosophize, but the Platos, the Thales, and the Pythagorases, seized by an ardent desire to know, undertook the greatest joumeys merely in order to learn, and went to far away places to shake off the yoke of National prejudices, to get to know men by their conformities and their differences, and to acquire that universal knowledge that is not exclusively of one Century or one country but of all times and all places, and thus is, so to speak, the common science of the wise?
[10] One admires the largess of a few men who, animated by curiosity, have at great expense made or sponsored voyages to the Orient with Learned men and Painters, there to make drawings of ruins and to decipher or copy Inscriptions; but I find it difficult to conceive how, in a Century that prides itself on outstanding knowledge, there are not two like-minded men, rich, one in money and the other in genius, both loving glory and aspiring to immortality, one of whom would sacrifice twenty thousand crowns of his fortune and the other ten years of his life for the sake of a notable voyage around the world; during which to study, not forever stones and plants, but, for once, men and morals, and who, after so many centuries spent measuring and examining the house, finally decided that they want to know its inhabitants.
[11] The Academicians who have traveled through the Northern parts of Europe and the Southern parts of America were more intent on visiting them as Geometers than as Philosophers. However, since they were both at once, the regions seen and described by such men as La Condamine and Maupertuis cannot be regarded as altogether unknown. The Jeweller Chardin, who traveled like Plato, has left nothing more to be said about Persia; China seems to have been well observed by the Jesuits; Kaempfer gives a tolerable idea of the little he saw in Japan. Except for these accounts, we do not know the Peoples of the East Indies, who are exclusively visited by Europeans more interested in filling their purses than their heads. All of Africa and its numerous inhabitants, as remarkable in character as they are in color, still remain to be studied; the whole earth is covered with Nations of which we know only the names, and yet we presume to judge mankind! Let us suppose a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a Diderot, a Duclos, a d'Alembert, a Condillac, or men of that stamp, traveling with a view to instructing their compatriots, observing and describing as they do so well, Turkey, Egypt, Barbary, the Empire of Morocco, Guinea, the lands of the Bantus, the interior and the East coasts of Africa, the Malabars, Mongolia, the banks of the Ganges, the Kingdoms of Slam, Pegu and Ava, China, Tartary, and above all Japan: then, In the other Hemisphere, Mexico, Peru, Chile, the Lands [around the Straits] of Magellan, without forgetting the Patagonians, true or false, Tucuman, Paraguay if possible, Brazil, finally the Caribbean, Florida, and all the Wild regions, this being the most important voyage of all and the one that should be undertaken with the greatest care; let us suppose that on their return from these memorable travels, these new Hercules set down at leisure the natural, moral and political history of what they had seen, then we would ourselves see a new world issue from their pen, and would thus learn to know our own: I say that when such Observers assert about a given Animal that it is a man and about another that it is a beast, they will have to be believed; but it would be most simpleminded to rely in this matter on coarse travelers about whom one might sometimes be tempted to ask the very question which they presume to answer about other animals.
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 19)
Note XI
This seems perfectly evident to me, and I cannot conceive where our Philosophers would have arise all the passions they attribute to Natural man. With the single exception of the Physically necessary, which Nature itself requires, all our other needs are needs only by habit, prior to which they were not needs, or by our desires, and one does not desire what one is not in a position to know. From which it follows that, since Savage man desires only the things he knows, and knows only the things the possession of which is in his power or easy to acquire, nothing must be so calm as his soul and nothing so limited as his mind.
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 25)
Note XII
[1] I find in Locke's Civil Government an objection that seems to me too specious to permit me to ignore it. "The end of society between Male and Female," says this philosopher, "being not barely procreation, but the continuation of the species; this society ought to last, even after procreation, so long as is necessary to the nourishment and support of the young ones, who are to be sustained by those that got them, till they are able to shift and provide for themselves. This rule, which the infinite wisdom of the creator hath set to the works of his hands, we find the creatures inferior to man steadily and precisely obey. In those animals which feed on grass, the Society between male and female lasts no longer than the very act of copulation; because the teat of the Dam being sufficient to nourish the young, till they be able to graze the grass, the male only begets, but concerns not himself for the female or young, to whose sustenance he can contribute nothing. But in beasts of prey the Society lasts longer: because the Dam not being able well to subsist herself, and nourish her offspring by her own prey alone, a more laborious, as well as more dangerous way of feeding than by feeding on grass, the assistance of the male is necessary to the maintenance of their common family. If one may use the term, which cannot subsist till they are able to prey for themselves, but by the care of Male and Female. The same is to be observed in all birds, except some Domestic ones, where plenty of food excuses the cock from feeding the young brood; it is to be observed that while the young in their nest need food, the male and the female take some there, till the young are able to use their wing, and provide for themselves.
[2] "And herein I think lies the chief, if not the only reason why the male and female in Mankind are obliged to a longer Society than other creatures. The reason is that the Woman is capable of conceiving and is commonly with child again, and brings forth too a new birth long before the former is out of a dependency for support on his parents' help, and able to shift for himself, and has all the assistance due to him from his parents. Whereby the Father, who is obliged to take care for those he hath begot, and to do so for a long time, is also under an obligation to continue in conjugal Society with the same woman from whom he had them, and to remain in that Society much longer than other creatures, whose young being able to subsist of themselves, before the time of procreation returns again, the bond between the male and the female dissolves of itself, and they are fully at liberty, till the season which customarily summons animals to join together, obliges them again to choose new mates. Wherein one cannot but admire the wisdom of the creator who having given to man foresight, and an ability to lay up for the future, as well as to supply the present necessity, wanted and arranged It so that Society of man should be much more lasting, than of male and female amongst the other creatures; that so their industry might be encouraged, and their interest better united, to make provision, and lay up goods for their common Issue, as nothing is more prejudicial to Children than uncertain and vague mixture, or easy and frequent dissolutions of conjugal Society."
[3] The same love of truth that led me to present this objection in all sincerity, moves me to accompany it with some remarks in order, if not to resolve it, at least to elucidate it.
[4] 1. In the first place, I will note that moral proofs are without great force in matters of Physics, and that they serve rather to provide reasons for existing facts than to ascertain the real existence of these facts. Yet this is the kind of proof Mr. Locke uses in the passage I have just cited; for although it may be advantageous to the human species for the union between man and woman to be permanent, it does not follow that it was so established by Nature; otherwise it would have to be said that Nature also instituted Civil Society, the Arts, Commerce, and everything that is claimed to be useful to men.
[5] 2. I do not know where Mr. Locke found that the Society of Male and Female lasts longer among animals of prey than among herbivores, and that one helps the other to feed the young: For the Dog, the Cat, the Bear, or the Wolf are not found to recognize their female better than the Horse, the Ram, the Bull, the Stag, or all other Quadrupeds recognize theirs. It would seem, on the contrary, that if the female did need the male's assistance to preserve her young, this would be so above all in the species that live exclusively off grass, because the Mother needs much time to graze, and during this entire stretch she is forced to neglect her brood, whereas a female Bear's or Wolf's prey is devoured in an instant, and she has more time to suckle her young without suffering hunger. This reasoning is confirmed by an observation about the relative number of teats and of young that distinguishes the carnivorous from the frugivorous species, and about which I spoke in Note vili. If that observation is correct and general, then a woman's having only two teats and rarely giving birth to more than one child at a time is one more strong reason to doubt that the human species is naturally Carnivorous, so that it would seem that in order to draw Locke's conclusion, his argument would have to be turned completely upside down. This same distinction is no more solid when applied to birds. For who can believe that the union of Male and Female is more lasting among vultures and Ravens than among Turtle-doves? We have two species of domestic birds, the Duck and the Pigeon, that provide us with examples directly contrary to this Author's System. The Pigeon, that lives exclusively off grain, remains united with its female, and they feed their young in common. The Duck, whose omnivorousness is well known, recognizes neither its female nor its young, and does not in any way help with their subsistence; and among Chickens, a species scarcely less carnivorous, there is no evidence that the Rooster cares at all about the brood. If in other species of birds the Male does share with the Female the care of feeding the young, it is because Birds which cannot fly at first and which their Mother cannot suckle, are much less able to do without the Father's assistance than Quadrupeds, where the Mother's teat suffices, at least for a time.
[6] 3. A good deal of uncertainty surrounds the principal fact that serves as the basis for Mr. Locke's entire argument: For in order to know whether, as he claims, in the pure state of Nature the woman is commonly with child again and brings forth too a new birth long before the previous one is able to shift for itself, would require experiments that Locke has surely not performed, and that no one is in a position to perform. The continual cohabitation of Husband and Wife provides such direct occasion to expose oneself to a new pregnancy that it is rather difficult to believe that fortuitous encounters or the impulsion of temperament alone would have produced as frequent effects in the pure state of Nature as In that of conjugal Society, a delay that might perhaps contribute to the children's becoming more sturdy and might, besides, be compensated for by having the faculty to conceive extended to a more advanced age in women who abused it less in their youth. Regarding Children, there are a good many reasons to believe that their strength and their organs develop later among us than they did in the primitive state of which I speak. The original weakness they owe to their Parents' constitution, the care taken to swaddle and cramp all their limbs, the softness in which they are reared, perhaps the use of another milk than their Mother's, everything thwarts and delays in them the first progress of Nature. Their being obliged to mind a thousand things to which their attention is constantly being drawn while their bodily strength is not given any exercise may further considerably hamper their growth; it is therefore likely that if, instead of initially overloading and tiring their minds in a thousand ways, their Bodies were allowed to move as actively and constantly as Nature seems to expect them to do, they would be able to walk, to act, and to fend for themselves much earlier.
[7] 4. Finally, Mr. Locke at most proves that the man might well have a motive for remaining attached to the woman when she has a Child; but he does not at all prove that he must have been attached to her before its birth and during the nine months of pregnancy. If a given woman is of no interest to a man for these nine months, if he ceases even to know her, why will he help her after the birth? Why will he help her rear a Child he does not even know is his, and whose birth he neither willed nor foresaw? Mr. Locke obviously presupposes what is in question: For it is not a matter of knowing why a man remains attached to a woman after the delivery, but why he gets attached to her after the conception. Once the appetite is satisfied, the man no longer needs this woman, nor the woman this man. He has not the least concern nor perhaps the least idea of the consequences of his action. One goes off in this direction, the other in that, and it is not likely that at the end of nine months they will remember ever having known each other: For the kind of memory by which an individual gives preference to an individual for the act of procreation requires, as I prove in the text, more progress or corruption of the human understanding than it can be assumed to have in the state of animality that is at issue here. Another woman can, therefore, satisfy a man's new desires as readily as the woman he had previously known, and another man can similarly satisfy the woman, assuming she is prompted by the same appetite during the state of pregnancy, which may reasonably be doubted. If, in the state of Nature, the woman no longer experiences the passion of love after the child has been conceived, then the obstacle to her Society with the man becomes much greater still, since she then no longer needs either the man who impregnated her or any other. There is, therefore, no reason for the man to seek out the same woman, nor for the woman to seek out the same man. Locke's argument therefore collapses, and all of that Philosopher's Dialectic has not protected him against the error Hobbes and others committed. They had to explain a fact of the state of Nature, that is to say of a state where men lived Isolated, and where a given man had no motive whatsoever to stay by the side of some other given man, nor perhaps did men have any motive to stay by one another, which is far worse; and it did not occur to them to look back past Centuries of Society, that is to say past the times when men always have a reason to stay close to one another, and a given man often has a reason to stay by the side of a given man or woman.
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 26)
Note XIII
I do not propose to get involved in the philosophical reflections that might be made regarding the advantages and the inconveniences of this institution of languages; I am not one to attack vulgar errors, and lettered folk respect their prejudices too much patiently to tolerate my supposed paradoxes. Let us therefore let speak the Persons for whom it has not been deemed a Crime to dare sometimes to take the side of reason against the opinion of the multitude. Nor would the happiness of mankind be in any way diminished if, after the evil and the confusion of so many languages has been banished, [all] mortals eagerly practiced [this] one art, and it were allowed to express everything in signs, movements, and gestures. But as things now stand, the condition of animals, which are commonly held to be dumb, appears in this respect to be much better than ours, for they can make their feelings and thoughts known without an interpreter, faster and perhaps more felicitously than any men can do, especially when they are speaking a foreign language. Isaac Vossius, de Poematum Cantu et Viribus Rythml, p. 66.
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 32)
Note XIV
Plato, showing how necessary Ideas of discrete quantity and its relations are in the least of arts, rightly mocks the Authors of his time who claimed that Palamedes had Invented numbers at the siege of Troy, as if, says this Philosopher, until then Agamemnon could not have known how many legs he had. Indeed, one senses how impossible it is for society and the arts to have reached the level they had already attained at the time of the siege of Troy, without men's being familiar with numbers and calculation: but the fact that a knowledge of numbers is necessary before other knowledge can be acquired does not make their invention any easier to imagine; once their names are known, it is easy to explain their meaning and to evoke the ideas these names represent; but in order to invent them, and before conceiving of these very ideas, one had, so to speak, to have become adept at philosophical meditation, to have practiced considering the beings exclusively in their essence and independently of all other perception, an abstraction that is very difficult, very metaphysical, not very natural, and yet without which these ideas could never have been transposed from one species or kind to another, nor numbers have become universal. A savage could consider separately his right leg and his left leg, or view them together in terms of the indivisible idea of a pair, without ever thinking that he had two of them; for the representative idea that depicts an object to us is one thing, and the numerical idea that specifies it is another. Still less could he count to five, and although by fitting his hands one to the other he could have noticed that the fingers matched exactly, he was far from considering their numerical equality; he no more knew the number of his fingers than of his hairs; and if, after having made him understand what numbers are, someone had told him that he had as many toes as fingers, he might perhaps have been very surprised, on comparing them, to find that this was true.
Discourse (Part I Paragraph 35)
Note XV
[1] Amour propre and Amour de soi-même, two passions very different in their nature and their effects, should not be confused. Self-love is a natural sentiment that inclines every animal to attend to its self-preservation and that, guided in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue. Amour propre is only a relative sentiment, factitious and bom in society, that inclines every individual to set greater stock by himself than by anyone else, inspires men with all the harms they do to one another, and is the genuine source of honor.
[2] This being clearly understood, I say that in our primitive state, in the genuine state of nature, Amour propre does not exist; For, since every individual human being views himself as the only Spectator to observe him, as the only being in the universe to take any interest in him, as the only judge of his own merit, it is not possible that a sentiment that originates in comparisons he is not capable of making could spring up in his soul: for the same reason, this man could have neither hatred nor desire for vengeance, passions that can arise only from the opinion of having received some offense; and since it is contempt or the intent to harm, and not the harm itself that constitutes the offense, men who are unable to appreciate or to compare themselves can do each other much violence when there is some advantage in it for them, without ever offending one another. In a word, since each man views his kind scarcely differently from the way he would view Animals of another species, he can rob the weaker of his prey or yield his own to the stronger without considering these acts of pillage as anything but natural occurrences, without the slightest stirring of arrogance or resentment, and with no other passion than the pain or the joy at a good or a bad outcome.
Discourse (Part II Paragraph 18)
Note XVI
[1] It is most remarkable that for all the years the Europeans have been tormenting themselves to bring the Savages of the various parts of the world around to their way of life, they should still not have been able to win over a single one of them, not even with the help of Christianity, for our missionaries sometimes make Christians of them, but never civilized men. Nothing can overcome their invincible repugnance to adopting our morals and Iving in our way. If these poor Savages are as unhappy as they are said to be, by what inconceivable depravity of judgment do they consistently refuse to adopt political society in Imitation of us, or to learn to live happy among us; whereas, one reads in a thousand places that Frenchmen and other Europeans have voluntarily taken refuge among these Nations, spent their entire lives there unable any longer to leave such a strange way of life, and one even finds sensible Missionaries regretting with emotion the calm and Innocent days they spent among those much despised peoples? If the answer is that they are not sufficiently enlightened to judge soundly of their state and of ours, I will reply that assessing happiness is less a matter of reason than of sentiment. Besides, this answer can be turned against us with even greater force; for the distance is greater between our ideas and the frame of mind required to appreciate the Savages' taste for their way of life, than between the Savages' ideas and the Ideas that might enable them to conceive of our way of life. Indeed, after a few observations they can readily see that all our labors are directed at only two objects: namely, the comforts of life for oneself, and consideration from others. But how are we to imagine the sort of pleasure a Savage takes in spending his life alone in the depths of the forests, or fishing, or blowing into a poor flute without ever managing to draw a single note from it and without troubling to learn to do so?
[2] On several occasions Savages have been brought to Paris, London, and other cities; people scurried to spread out before them our luxury, our wealth, and all of our most useful and most singular arts; none of which ever excited in them anything but a stupid admiration, without the slightest stirring of covetousness. I remember, among others, the Story of a chief of some North Americans who was brought to the Court of England about thirty years ago. He was shown a thousand things in search of some present he might like, without finding anything he seemed to care for. Our weapons seemed to him heavy and clumsy, our shoes hurt his feet, he found our clothes cumbersome, he rejected everything: finally it was noticed that, having picked up a wool blanket, he seemed to take pleasure in wrapping it around his shoulders; you will at least allow, someone straightaway said to him, the usefulness of this furnishing? Yes, he answered, It seems to me almost as good as an animal skin. He would not even have said that if he had worn them both in the rain.
[3] I will perhaps be told that it is habit which, by attaching everyone to his way of life, prevents Savages from feeling what is good in ours: And on this basis it must, to say the least, appear very extraordinary that habit should prove stronger In preserving the Savages' taste for their misery than the Europeans' enjoyment of their felicity. But to meet this last objection with an answer that admits of not a single word in reply - without invoking all the young Savages whom vain efforts have been made to Civilize; without speaking of the Greenlanders or of the Inhabitants of Iceland whom attempts have been made to raise and rear in Denmark, and all of whom died of sorrow and despair, either from yearning, or in the sea across which they tried to swim back to their country - I will limit myself to citing a single well attested example which I submit to the scrutiny of admirers of the European Political order.
[4] “All the efforts of the Dutch Missionaries of the Cape of Good Hope never Succeeded in converting a single Hottentot. Van der Stel, Governor of the Cape, having taken in one of them in Infancy, had him brought up in the principles of the Christian Religion and in the observance of European customs. He was richly dressed, taught several languages, and his progress fully corresponded to the care taken with his education. The Governor, having high hopes for his mind, sent him to India with a Commissioner-General who employed him usefully in the Company's business. After the Commissioner's death, he returned to the Cape. A few days after his return, during a visit to some Hottentot relatives of his, he decided to divest himself of his European garb and dress in a Sheepskin. He returned to the Fort in this new outfit carrying a packet of his former clothes and, presenting them to the Governor, he addressed this discourse to him. Be so good, Sir, as to note that I forever renounce these trappings. I also renounce the Christian Religion for the rest of my life; my resolution is to live and die in the Religion, the ways, and the customs of my Ancestors. The one favor I ask of you is to leave me the Necklace and the Cutlass I am wearing. I shall keep them for love of you. Straightaway, without waiting for Van der Stel's reply, he ran off and was never again seen at the Cape." Histoire des Voyages, vol. 5, p. 175.
Discourse (Part II Paragraph 29)
Note XVII
[1] It might be objected to me that amid such a disorder, men, instead of stubbornly slaughtering one another, would have dispersed if there had been no limits to their dispersion. But, in the first place, these limits would at least have been those of the world, and if one thinks of the excessively large population that results from the state of Nature, one has to conclude that, in that state, the earth would soon have been covered with men thus forced to remain assembled. Besides, they would have dispersed if the evil had occurred suddenly and the change taken place from one day to the next; but they were born under the yoke; by the time they felt its weight they were in the habit of bearing it and left it at waiting for the opportunity to shake it off. Finally, already accustomed to a thousand comforts that forced them to remain assembled, dispersion was no longer as easy as in the first times when, no one needing anyone but himself, everyone made his decision without waiting for anyone else's consent.
Discourse (Part II Paragraph 33)
Note XVIII
Marshal de V*** told that in one of his Campaigns, when a Food Contractor's excessive frauds had caused suffering and grumbling in the army, he roundly took the man to task and threatened to have him hanged. This threat does not bother me, the scoundrel brashly replied, and I am pleased to tell you that a man with a hundred thousand crowns at his disposal does not get hanged. I do not know how it happened, the Marshal naïvely added, but he was indeed not hanged although he had deserved it a hundred times.
Discourse (Part II Paragraph 52)
Note XIX
Distributive justice would be at odds with this strict equality of the state of Nature, even if it were practicable in civil society; and since all the members of the State owe it services proportionate to their talents and strengths, the Citizens ought, in turn, to be distinguished and favored in proportion to their services. It is in this sense that a passage of Isocrates must be understood, in which he praises the first Athenians for having correctly discerned which of the two sorts of equality is the more advantageous; the one that consists in allotting the same advantages to all Citizens Indifferently, and the other in distributing them according to each one's deserts. These skillful politicians, adds the orator, by banishing the unjust equality that draws no distinction between wicked and good men, inviolably adhered to the equality that rewards and punishes everyone according to his deserts. But, first, no society has ever existed, regardless of the degree of corruption they may have reached, in which no distinction whatsoever was drawn between wicked and good men; and in matters of morals where it cannot establish a sufficiently precise standard to serve as the rule for the Magistrate, the Law, in order not to leave the Citizens' fate or rank to his discretion, very wisely forbids him to pass judgment on persons, and restricts him to judgments on Actions. Only morals as pure as those of the Ancient Romans can tolerate Censors, and such tribunals would soon have overturned everything among us: It is up to public esteem to draw the distinction between wicked and good men; the Magistrate is judge only of rigorous right; but the people is the genuine judge of morals; a judge of integrity and even enlightenment on this point, sometimes deceived, but never corrupted. The ranks of the Citizens ought, therefore, to be regulated not according to their personal merit, which would be to leave to the Magistrate the means of applying the Law in an almost arbitrary fashion, but according to the real services they render to the State, which admit of more accurate assessment.
