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.