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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11136 ***
+
+A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of The Inequality Among
+Mankind
+
+By J. J. Rousseau
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTORY NOTE
+
+Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva, June 28, 1712, the son of a
+watchmaker of French origin. His education was irregular, and though
+he tried many professions--including engraving, music, and
+teaching--he found it difficult to support himself in any of them. The
+discovery of his talent as a writer came with the winning of a prize
+offered by the Academy of Dijon for a discourse on the question,
+"Whether the progress of the sciences and of letters has tended to
+corrupt or to elevate morals." He argued so brilliantly that the
+tendency of civilization was degrading that he became at once famous.
+The discourse here printed on the causes of inequality among men was
+written in a similar competition.
+
+He now concentrated his powers upon literature, producing two novels,
+"La Nouvelle Heloise," the forerunner and parent of endless
+sentimental and picturesque fictions; and "Emile, ou l'Education," a
+work which has had enormous influence on the theory and practise of
+pedagogy down to our own time and in which the Savoyard Vicar appears,
+who is used as the mouthpiece for Rousseau's own religious ideas. "Le
+Contrat Social" (1762) elaborated the doctrine of the discourse on
+inequality. Both historically and philosophically it is unsound; but
+it was the chief literary source of the enthusiasm for liberty,
+fraternity, and equality, which inspired the leaders of the French
+Revolution, and its effects passed far beyond France.
+
+His most famous work, the "Confessions," was published after his
+death. This book is a mine of information as to his life, but it is
+far from trustworthy; and the picture it gives of the author's
+personality and conduct, though painted in such a way as to make it
+absorbingly interesting, is often unpleasing in the highest degree.
+But it is one of the great autobiographies of the world.
+
+During Rousseau's later years he was the victim of the delusion of
+persecution; and although he was protected by a succession of good
+friends, he came to distrust and quarrel with each in turn. He died at
+Ermenonville, near Paris, July 2, 1778, the most widely influential
+French writer of his age.
+
+The Savoyard Vicar and his "Profession of Faith" are introduced into
+"Emile" not, according to the author, because he wishes to exhibit his
+principles as those which should be taught, but to give an example of
+the way in which religious matters should be discussed with the young.
+Nevertheless, it is universally recognized that these opinions are
+Rousseau's own, and represent in short form his characteristic
+attitude toward religious belief. The Vicar himself is believed to
+combine the traits of two Savoyard priests whom Rousseau knew in his
+youth. The more important was the Abbe Gaime, whom he had known at
+Turin; the other, the Abbe Gatier, who had taught him at Annecy.
+
+
+
+
+QUESTION PROPOSED BY THE ACADEMY OF DIJON
+
+What is the Origin of the Inequality among Mankind; and whether such
+Inequality is authorized by the Law of Nature?
+
+
+
+
+A DISCOURSE UPON THE ORIGIN AND THE FOUNDATION OF THE INEQUALITY AMONG
+MANKIND
+
+'Tis of man I am to speak; and the very question, in answer to which I
+am to speak of him, sufficiently informs me that I am going to speak
+to men; for to those alone, who are not afraid of honouring truth, it
+belongs to propose discussions of this kind. I shall therefore
+maintain with confidence the cause of mankind before the sages, who
+invite me to stand up in its defence; and I shall think myself happy,
+if I can but behave in a manner not unworthy of my subject and of my
+judges.
+
+I conceive two species of inequality among men; one which I call
+natural, or physical inequality, because it is established by nature,
+and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and
+the qualities of the mind, or of the soul; the other which may be
+termed moral, or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of
+convention, and is established, or at least authorized, by the common
+consent of mankind. This species of inequality consists in the
+different privileges, which some men enjoy, to the prejudice of
+others, such as that of being richer, more honoured, more powerful,
+and even that of exacting obedience from them.
+
+It were absurd to ask, what is the cause of natural inequality, seeing
+the bare definition of natural inequality answers the question: it
+would be more absurd still to enquire, if there might not be some
+essential connection between the two species of inequality, as it
+would be asking, in other words, if those who command are necessarily
+better men than those who obey; and if strength of body or of mind,
+wisdom or virtue are always to be found in individuals, in the same
+proportion with power, or riches: a question, fit perhaps to be
+discussed by slaves in the hearing of their masters, but unbecoming
+free and reasonable beings in quest of truth.
+
+What therefore is precisely the subject of this discourse? It is to
+point out, in the progress of things, that moment, when, right taking
+place of violence, nature became subject to law; to display that chain
+of surprising events, in consequence of which the strong submitted to
+serve the weak, and the people to purchase imaginary ease, at the
+expense of real happiness.
+
+The philosophers, who have examined the foundations of society, have,
+every one of them, perceived the necessity of tracing it back to a
+state of nature, but not one of them has ever arrived there. Some of
+them have not scrupled to attribute to man in that state the ideas of
+justice and injustice, without troubling their heads to prove, that he
+really must have had such ideas, or even that such ideas were useful
+to him: others have spoken of the natural right of every man to keep
+what belongs to him, without letting us know what they meant by the
+word belong; others, without further ceremony ascribing to the
+strongest an authority over the weakest, have immediately struck out
+government, without thinking of the time requisite for men to form any
+notion of the things signified by the words authority and government.
+All of them, in fine, constantly harping on wants, avidity,
+oppression, desires and pride, have transferred to the state of nature
+ideas picked up in the bosom of society. In speaking of savages they
+described citizens. Nay, few of our own writers seem to have so much
+as doubted, that a state of nature did once actually exist; though it
+plainly appears by Sacred History, that even the first man,
+immediately furnished as he was by God himself with both instructions
+and precepts, never lived in that state, and that, if we give to the
+books of Moses that credit which every Christian philosopher ought to
+give to them, we must deny that, even before the deluge, such a state
+ever existed among men, unless they fell into it by some extraordinary
+event: a paradox very difficult to maintain, and altogether impossible
+to prove.
+
+Let us begin therefore, by laying aside facts, for they do not affect
+the question. The researches, in which we may engage on this occasion,
+are not to be taken for historical truths, but merely as hypothetical
+and conditional reasonings, fitter to illustrate the nature of things,
+than to show their true origin, like those systems, which our
+naturalists daily make of the formation of the world. Religion
+commands us to believe, that men, having been drawn by God himself out
+of a state of nature, are unequal, because it is his pleasure they
+should be so; but religion does not forbid us to draw conjectures
+solely from the nature of man, considered in itself, and from that of
+the beings which surround him, concerning the fate of mankind, had
+they been left to themselves. This is then the question I am to
+answer, the question I propose to examine in the present discourse. As
+mankind in general have an interest in my subject, I shall endeavour
+to use a language suitable to all nations; or rather, forgetting the
+circumstances of time and place in order to think of nothing but the
+men I speak to, I shall suppose myself in the Lyceum of Athens,
+repeating the lessons of my masters before the Platos and the
+Xenocrates of that famous seat of philosophy as my judges, and in
+presence of the whole human species as my audience.
+
+O man, whatever country you may belong to, whatever your opinions may
+be, attend to my words; you shall hear your history such as I think I
+have read it, not in books composed by those like you, for they are
+liars, but in the book of nature which never lies. All that I shall
+repeat after her, must be true, without any intermixture of falsehood,
+but where I may happen, without intending it, to introduce my own
+conceits. The times I am going to speak of are very remote. How much
+you are changed from what you once were! 'Tis in a manner the life of
+your species that I am going to write, from the qualities which you
+have received, and which your education and your habits could deprave,
+but could not destroy. There is, I am sensible, an age at which every
+individual of you would choose to stop; and you will look out for the
+age at which, had you your wish, your species had stopped. Uneasy at
+your present condition for reasons which threaten your unhappy
+posterity with still greater uneasiness, you will perhaps wish it were
+in your power to go back; and this sentiment ought to be considered,
+as the panegyric of your first parents, the condemnation of your
+contemporaries, and a source of terror to all those who may have the
+misfortune of succeeding you.
+
+
+
+
+DISCOURSE FIRST PART
+
+However important it may be, in order to form a proper judgment of the
+natural state of man, to consider him from his origin, and to examine
+him, as it were, in the first embryo of the species; I shall not
+attempt to trace his organization through its successive approaches to
+perfection: I shall not stop to examine in the animal system what he
+might have been in the beginning, to become at last what he actually
+is; I shall not inquire whether, as Aristotle thinks, his neglected
+nails were no better at first than crooked talons; whether his whole
+body was not, bear-like, thick covered with rough hair; and whether,
+walking upon all-fours, his eyes, directed to the earth, and confined
+to a horizon of a few paces extent, did not at once point out the
+nature and limits of his ideas. I could only form vague, and almost
+imaginary, conjectures on this subject. Comparative anatomy has not as
+yet been sufficiently improved; neither have the observations of
+natural philosophy been sufficiently ascertained, to establish upon
+such foundations the basis of a solid system. For this reason, without
+having recourse to the supernatural informations with which we have
+been favoured on this head, or paying any attention to the changes,
+that must have happened in the conformation of the interior and
+exterior parts of man's body, in proportion as he applied his members
+to new purposes, and took to new aliments, I shall suppose his
+conformation to have always been, what we now behold it; that he
+always walked on two feet, made the same use of his hands that we do
+of ours, extended his looks over the whole face of nature, and
+measured with his eyes the vast extent of the heavens.
+
+If I strip this being, thus constituted, of all the supernatural gifts
+which he may have received, and of all the artificial faculties, which
+we could not have acquired but by slow degrees; if I consider him, in
+a word, such as he must have issued from the hands of nature; I see an
+animal less strong than some, and less active than others, but, upon
+the whole, the most advantageously organized of any; I see him
+satisfying the calls of hunger under the first oak, and those of
+thirst at the first rivulet; I see him laying himself down to sleep at
+the foot of the same tree that afforded him his meal; and behold, this
+done, all his wants are completely supplied.
+
+The earth left to its own natural fertility and covered with immense
+woods, that no hatchet ever disfigured, offers at every step food and
+shelter to every species of animals. Men, dispersed among them,
+observe and imitate their industry, and thus rise to the instinct of
+beasts; with this advantage, that, whereas every species of beasts is
+confined to one peculiar instinct, man, who perhaps has not any that
+particularly belongs to him, appropriates to himself those of all
+other animals, and lives equally upon most of the different aliments,
+which they only divide among themselves; a circumstance which
+qualifies him to find his subsistence, with more ease than any of
+them.
+
+Men, accustomed from their infancy to the inclemency of the weather,
+and to the rigour of the different seasons; inured to fatigue, and
+obliged to defend, naked and without arms, their life and their prey
+against the other wild inhabitants of the forest, or at least to avoid
+their fury by flight, acquire a robust and almost unalterable habit of
+body; the children, bringing with them into the world the excellent
+constitution of their parents, and strengthening it by the same
+exercises that first produced it, attain by this means all the vigour
+that the human frame is capable of. Nature treats them exactly in the
+same manner that Sparta treated the children of her citizens; those
+who come well formed into the world she renders strong and robust, and
+destroys all the rest; differing in this respect from our societies,
+in which the state, by permitting children to become burdensome to
+their parents, murders them all without distinction, even in the wombs
+of their mothers.
+
+The body being the only instrument that savage man is acquainted with,
+he employs it to different uses, of which ours, for want of practice,
+are incapable; and we may thank our industry for the loss of that
+strength and agility, which necessity obliges him to acquire. Had he a
+hatchet, would his hand so easily snap off from an oak so stout a
+branch? Had he a sling, would it dart a stone to so great a distance?
+Had he a ladder, would he run so nimbly up a tree? Had he a horse,
+would he with such swiftness shoot along the plain? Give civilized man
+but time to gather about him all his machines, and no doubt he will be
+an overmatch for the savage: but if you have a mind to see a contest
+still more unequal, place them naked and unarmed one opposite to the
+other; and you will soon discover the advantage there is in
+perpetually having all our forces at our disposal, in being constantly
+prepared against all events, and in always carrying ourselves, as it
+were, whole and entire about us.
+
+Hobbes would have it that man is naturally void of fear, and always
+intent upon attacking and fighting. An illustrious philosopher thinks
+on the contrary, and Cumberland and Puffendorff likewise affirm it,
+that nothing is more fearful than man in a state of nature, that he is
+always in a tremble, and ready to fly at the first motion he
+perceives, at the first noise that strikes his ears. This, indeed, may
+be very true in regard to objects with which he is not acquainted; and
+I make no doubt of his being terrified at every new sight that
+presents itself, as often as he cannot distinguish the physical good
+and evil which he may expect from it, nor compare his forces with the
+dangers he has to encounter; circumstances that seldom occur in a
+state of nature, where all things proceed in so uniform a manner, and
+the face of the earth is not liable to those sudden and continual
+changes occasioned in it by the passions and inconstancies of
+collected bodies. But savage man living among other animals without
+any society or fixed habitation, and finding himself early under a
+necessity of measuring his strength with theirs, soon makes a
+comparison between both, and finding that he surpasses them more in
+address, than they surpass him in strength, he learns not to be any
+longer in dread of them. Turn out a bear or a wolf against a sturdy,
+active, resolute savage, (and this they all are,) provided with stones
+and a good stick; and you will soon find that the danger is at least
+equal on both sides, and that after several trials of this kind, wild
+beasts, who are not fond of attacking each other, will not be very
+fond of attacking man, whom they have found every whit as wild as
+themselves. As to animals who have really more strength than man has
+address, he is, in regard to them, what other weaker species are, who
+find means to subsist notwithstanding; he has even this great
+advantage over such weaker species, that being equally fleet with
+them, and finding on every tree an almost inviolable asylum, he is
+always at liberty to take it or leave it, as he likes best, and of
+course to fight or to fly, whichever is most agreeable to him. To this
+we may add that no animal naturally makes war upon man, except in the
+case of self-defence or extreme hunger; nor ever expresses against him
+any of these violent antipathies, which seem to indicate that some
+particular species are intended by nature for the food of others.
+
+But there are other more formidable enemies, and against which man is
+not provided with the same means of defence; I mean natural
+infirmities, infancy, old age, and sickness of every kind, melancholy
+proofs of our weakness, whereof the two first are common to all
+animals, and the last chiefly attends man living in a state of
+society. It is even observable in regard to infancy, that the mother
+being able to carry her child about with her, wherever she goes, can
+perform the duty of a nurse with a great deal less trouble, than the
+females of many other animals, who are obliged to be constantly going
+and coming with no small labour and fatigue, one way to look out for
+their own subsistence, and another to suckle and feed their young
+ones. True it is that, if the woman happens to perish, her child is
+exposed to the greatest danger of perishing with her; but this danger
+is common to a hundred other species, whose young ones require a great
+deal of time to be able to provide for themselves; and if our infancy
+is longer than theirs, our life is longer likewise; so that, in this
+respect too, all things are in a manner equal; not but that there are
+other rules concerning the duration of the first age of life, and the
+number of the young of man and other animals, but they do not belong
+to my subject. With old men, who stir and perspire but little, the
+demand for food diminishes with their abilities to provide it; and as
+a savage life would exempt them from the gout and the rheumatism, and
+old age is of all ills that which human assistance is least capable of
+alleviating, they would at last go off, without its being perceived by
+others that they ceased to exist, and almost without perceiving it
+themselves.
+
+In regard to sickness, I shall not repeat the vain and false
+declamations made use of to discredit medicine by most men, while they
+enjoy their health; I shall only ask if there are any solid
+observations from which we may conclude that in those countries where
+the healing art is most neglected, the mean duration of man's life is
+shorter than in those where it is most cultivated? And how is it
+possible this should be the case, if we inflict more diseases upon
+ourselves than medicine can supply us with remedies! The extreme
+inequalities in the manner of living of the several classes of
+mankind, the excess of idleness in some, and of labour in others, the
+facility of irritating and satisfying our sensuality and our
+appetites, the too exquisite and out of the way aliments of the rich,
+which fill them with fiery juices, and bring on indigestions, the
+unwholesome food of the poor, of which even, bad as it is, they very
+often fall short, and the want of which tempts them, every opportunity
+that offers, to eat greedily and overload their stomachs; watchings,
+excesses of every kind, immoderate transports of all the passions,
+fatigues, waste of spirits, in a word, the numberless pains and
+anxieties annexed to every condition, and which the mind of man is
+constantly a prey to; these are the fatal proofs that most of our ills
+are of our own making, and that we might have avoided them all by
+adhering to the simple, uniform and solitary way of life prescribed to
+us by nature. Allowing that nature intended we should always enjoy
+good health, I dare almost affirm that a state of reflection is a
+state against nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved
+animal. We need only call to mind the good constitution of savages,
+of those at least whom we have not destroyed by our strong liquors; we
+need only reflect, that they are strangers to almost every disease,
+except those occasioned by wounds and old age, to be in a manner
+convinced that the history of human diseases might be easily composed
+by pursuing that of civil societies. Such at least was the opinion of
+Plato, who concluded from certain remedies made use of or approved by
+Podalyrus and Macaon at the Siege of Troy, that several disorders,
+which these remedies were found to bring on in his days, were not
+known among men at that remote period.
+
+Man therefore, in a state of nature where there are so few sources of
+sickness, can have no great occasion for physic, and still less for
+physicians; neither is the human species more to be pitied in this
+respect, than any other species of animals. Ask those who make hunting
+their recreation or business, if in their excursions they meet with
+many sick or feeble animals. They meet with many carrying the marks of
+considerable wounds, that have been perfectly well healed and closed
+up; with many, whose bones formerly broken, and whose limbs almost
+torn off, have completely knit and united, without any other surgeon
+but time, any other regimen but their usual way of living, and whose
+cures were not the less perfect for their not having been tortured
+with incisions, poisoned with drugs, or worn out by diet and
+abstinence. In a word, however useful medicine well administered may
+be to us who live in a state of society, it is still past doubt, that
+if, on the one hand, the sick savage, destitute of help, has nothing
+to hope from nature, on the other, he has nothing to fear but from his
+disease; a circumstance, which oftens renders his situation preferable
+to ours.
+
+Let us therefore beware of confounding savage man with the men, whom
+we daily see and converse with. Nature behaves towards all animals
+left to her care with a predilection, that seems to prove how jealous
+she is of that prerogative. The horse, the cat, the bull, nay the ass
+itself, have generally a higher stature, and always a more robust
+constitution, more vigour, more strength and courage in their forests
+than in our houses; they lose half these advantages by becoming
+domestic animals; it looks as if all our attention to treat them
+kindly, and to feed them well, served only to bastardize them. It is
+thus with man himself. In proportion as he becomes sociable and a
+slave to others, he becomes weak, fearful, mean-spirited, and his soft
+and effeminate way of living at once completes the enervation of his
+strength and of his courage. We may add, that there must be still a
+wider difference between man and man in a savage and domestic
+condition, than between beast and beast; for as men and beasts have
+been treated alike by nature, all the conveniences with which men
+indulge themselves more than they do the beasts tamed by them, are so
+many particular causes which make them degenerate more sensibly.
+
+Nakedness therefore, the want of houses, and of all these
+unnecessaries, which we consider as so very necessary, are not such
+mighty evils in respect to these primitive men, and much less still
+any obstacle to their preservation. Their skins, it is true, are
+destitute of hair; but then they have no occasion for any such
+covering in warm climates; and in cold climates they soon learn to
+apply to that use those of the animals they have conquered; they have
+but two feet to run with, but they have two hands to defend themselves
+with, and provide for all their wants; it costs them perhaps a great
+deal of time and trouble to make their children walk, but the mothers
+carry them with ease; an advantage not granted to other species of
+animals, with whom the mother, when pursued, is obliged to abandon her
+young ones, or regulate her steps by theirs. In short, unless we admit
+those singular and fortuitous concurrences of circumstances, which I
+shall speak of hereafter, and which, it is very possible, may never
+have existed, it is evident, in every state of the question, that the
+man, who first made himself clothes and built himself a cabin,
+supplied himself with things which he did not much want, since he had
+lived without them till then; and why should he not have been able to
+support in his riper years, the same kind of life, which he had
+supported from his infancy?
+
+Alone, idle, and always surrounded with danger, savage man must be
+fond of sleep, and sleep lightly like other animals, who think but
+little, and may, in a manner, be said to sleep all the time they do
+not think: self-preservation being almost his only concern, he must
+exercise those faculties most, which are most serviceable in attacking
+and in defending, whether to subdue his prey, or to prevent his
+becoming that of other animals: those organs, on the contrary, which
+softness and sensuality can alone improve, must remain in a state of
+rudeness, utterly incompatible with all manner of delicacy; and as his
+senses are divided on this point, his touch and his taste must be
+extremely coarse and blunt; his sight, his hearing, and his smelling
+equally subtle: such is the animal state in general, and accordingly
+if we may believe travellers, it is that of most savage nations. We
+must not therefore be surprised, that the Hottentots of the Cape of
+Good Hope, distinguish with their naked eyes ships on the ocean, at as
+great a distance as the Dutch can discern them with their glasses; nor
+that the savages of America should have tracked the Spaniards with
+their noses, to as great a degree of exactness, as the best dogs could
+have done; nor that all these barbarous nations support nakedness
+without pain, use such large quantities of Piemento to give their food
+a relish, and drink like water the strongest liquors of Europe.
+
+As yet I have considered man merely in his physical capacity; let us
+now endeavour to examine him in a metaphysical and moral light.
+
+I can discover nothing in any mere animal but an ingenious machine, to
+which nature has given senses to wind itself up, and guard, to a
+certain degree, against everything that might destroy or disorder it.
+I perceive the very same things in the human machine, with this
+difference, that nature alone operates in all the operations of the
+beast, whereas man, as a free agent, has a share in his. One chooses
+by instinct; the other by an act of liberty; for which reason the
+beast cannot deviate from the rules that have been prescribed to it,
+even in cases where such deviation might be useful, and man often
+deviates from the rules laid down for him to his prejudice. Thus a
+pigeon would starve near a dish of the best flesh-meat, and a cat on a
+heap of fruit or corn, though both might very well support life with
+the food which they thus disdain, did they but bethink themselves to
+make a trial of it: it is in this manner dissolute men run into
+excesses, which bring on fevers and death itself; because the mind
+depraves the senses, and when nature ceases to speak, the will still
+continues to dictate.
+
+All animals must be allowed to have ideas, since all animals have
+senses; they even combine their ideas to a certain degree, and, in
+this respect, it is only the difference of such degree, that
+constitutes the difference between man and beast: some philosophers
+have even advanced, that there is a greater difference between some
+men and some others, than between some men and some beasts; it is not
+therefore so much the understanding that constitutes, among animals,
+the specifical distinction of man, as his quality of a free agent.
+Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels the
+same impression, but he at the same time perceives that he is free to
+resist or to acquiesce; and it is in the consciousness of this
+liberty, that the spirituality of his soul chiefly appears: for
+natural philosophy explains, in some measure, the mechanism of the
+senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of willing, or
+rather of choosing, and in the consciousness of this power, nothing
+can be discovered but acts, that are purely spiritual, and cannot be
+accounted for by the laws of mechanics.
+
+But though the difficulties, in which all these questions are
+involved, should leave some room to dispute on this difference between
+man and beast, there is another very specific quality that
+distinguishes them, and a quality which will admit of no dispute; this
+is the faculty of improvement; a faculty which, as circumstances
+offer, successively unfolds all the other faculties, and resides among
+us not only in the species, but in the individuals that compose it;
+whereas a beast is, at the end of some months, all he ever will be
+during the rest of his life; and his species, at the end of a thousand
+years, precisely what it was the first year of that long period. Why
+is man alone subject to dotage? Is it not, because he thus returns to
+his primitive condition? And because, while the beast, which has
+acquired nothing and has likewise nothing to lose, continues always in
+possession of his instinct, man, losing by old age, or by accident,
+all the acquisitions he had made in consequence of his perfectibility,
+thus falls back even lower than beasts themselves? It would be a
+melancholy necessity for us to be obliged to allow, that this
+distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all man's
+misfortunes; that it is this faculty, which, though by slow degrees,
+draws them out of their original condition, in which his days would
+slide away insensibly in peace and innocence; that it is this faculty,
+which, in a succession of ages, produces his discoveries and mistakes,
+his virtues and his vices, and, at long run, renders him both his own
+and nature's tyrant. It would be shocking to be obliged to commend, as
+a beneficent being, whoever he was that first suggested to the
+_Oronoco_ Indians the use of those boards which they bind on the
+temples of their children, and which secure to them the enjoyment of
+some part at least of their natural imbecility and happiness.
+
+Savage man, abandoned by nature to pure instinct, or rather
+indemnified for that which has perhaps been denied to him by faculties
+capable of immediately supplying the place of it, and of raising him
+afterwards a great deal higher, would therefore begin with functions
+that were merely animal: to see and to feel would be his first
+condition, which he would enjoy in common with other animals. To will
+and not to will, to wish and to fear, would be the first, and in a
+manner, the only operations of his soul, till new circumstances
+occasioned new developments.
+
+Let moralists say what they will, the human understanding is greatly
+indebted to the passions, which, on their side, are likewise
+universally allowed to be greatly indebted to the human understanding.
+It is by the activity of our passions, that our reason improves: we
+covet knowledge merely because we covet enjoyment, and it is
+impossible to conceive why a man exempt from fears and desires should
+take the trouble to reason. The passions, in their turn, owe their
+origin to our wants, and their increase to our progress in science;
+for we cannot desire or fear anything, but in consequence of the ideas
+we have of it, or of the simple impulses of nature; and savage man,
+destitute of every species of knowledge, experiences no passions but
+those of this last kind; his desires never extend beyond his physical
+wants; he knows no goods but food, a female, and rest; he fears no
+evil but pain, and hunger; I say pain, and not death; for no animal,
+merely as such, will ever know what it is to die, and the knowledge of
+death, and of its terrors, is one of the first acquisitions made by
+man, in consequence of his deviating from the animal state.
+
+I could easily, were it requisite, cite facts in support of this
+opinion, and show, that the progress of the mind has everywhere kept
+pace exactly with the wants, to which nature had left the inhabitants
+exposed, or to which circumstances had subjected them, and
+consequently to the passions, which inclined them to provide for these
+wants. I could exhibit in Egypt the arts starting up, and extending
+themselves with the inundations of the Nile; I could pursue them in
+their progress among the Greeks, where they were seen to bud forth,
+grow, and rise to the heavens, in the midst of the sands and rocks of
+Attica, without being able to take root on the fertile banks of the
+Eurotas; I would observe that, in general, the inhabitants of the
+north are more industrious than those of the south, because they can
+less do without industry; as if nature thus meant to make all things
+equal, by giving to the mind that fertility she has denied to the
+soil.
+
+But exclusive of the uncertain testimonies of history, who does not
+perceive that everything seems to remove from savage man the
+temptation and the means of altering his condition? His imagination
+paints nothing to him; his heart asks nothing from him. His moderate
+wants are so easily supplied with what he everywhere finds ready to
+his hand, and he stands at such a distance from the degree of
+knowledge requisite to covet more, that he can neither have foresight
+nor curiosity. The spectacle of nature, by growing quite familiar to
+him, becomes at last equally indifferent. It is constantly the same
+order, constantly the same revolutions; he has not sense enough to
+feel surprise at the sight of the greatest wonders; and it is not in
+his mind we must look for that philosophy, which man must have to know
+how to observe once, what he has every day seen. His soul, which
+nothing disturbs, gives itself up entirely to the consciousness of its
+actual existence, without any thought of even the nearest futurity;
+and his projects, equally confined with his views, scarce extend to
+the end of the day. Such is, even at present, the degree of foresight
+in the Caribbean: he sells his cotton bed in the morning, and comes in
+the evening, with tears in his eyes, to buy it back, not having
+foreseen that he should want it again the next night.
+
+The more we meditate on this subject, the wider does the distance
+between mere sensation and the most simple knowledge become in our
+eyes; and it is impossible to conceive how man, by his own powers
+alone, without the assistance of communication, and the spur of
+necessity, could have got over so great an interval. How many ages
+perhaps revolved, before men beheld any other fire but that of the
+heavens? How many different accidents must have concurred to make them
+acquainted with the most common uses of this element? How often have
+they let it go out, before they knew the art of reproducing it? And
+how often perhaps has not every one of these secrets perished with the
+discoverer? What shall we say of agriculture, an art which requires so
+much labour and foresight; which depends upon other arts; which, it is
+very evident, cannot be practised but in a society, if not a formed
+one, at least one of some standing, and which does not so much serve
+to draw aliments from the earth, for the earth would yield them
+without all that trouble, as to oblige her to produce those things,
+which we like best, preferably to others? But let us suppose that men
+had multiplied to such a degree, that the natural products of the
+earth no longer sufficed for their support; a supposition which, by
+the bye, would prove that this kind of life would be very advantageous
+to the human species; let us suppose that, without forge or anvil, the
+instruments of husbandry had dropped from the heavens into the hands
+of savages, that these men had got the better of that mortal aversion
+they all have for constant labour; that they had learned to foretell
+their wants at so great a distance of time; that they had guessed
+exactly how they were to break the earth, commit their seed to it, and
+plant trees; that they had found out the art of grinding their corn,
+and improving by fermentation the juice of their grapes; all
+operations which we must allow them to have learned from the gods,
+since we cannot conceive how they should make such discoveries of
+themselves; after all these fine presents, what man would be mad
+enough to cultivate a field, that may be robbed by the first comer,
+man or beast, who takes a fancy to the produce of it. And would any
+man consent to spend his day in labour and fatigue, when the rewards
+of his labour and fatigue became more and more precarious in
+proportion to his want of them? In a word, how could this situation
+engage men to cultivate the earth, as long as it was not parcelled out
+among them, that is, as long as a state of nature subsisted.
+
+Though we should suppose savage man as well versed in the art of
+thinking, as philosophers make him; though we were, after them, to
+make him a philosopher himself, discovering of himself the sublimest
+truths, forming to himself, by the most abstract arguments, maxims of
+justice and reason drawn from the love of order in general, or from
+the known will of his Creator: in a word, though we were to suppose
+his mind as intelligent and enlightened, as it must, and is, in fact,
+found to be dull and stupid; what benefit would the species receive
+from all these metaphysical discoveries, which could not be
+communicated, but must perish with the individual who had made them?
+What progress could mankind make in the forests, scattered up and down
+among the other animals? And to what degree could men mutually improve
+and enlighten each other, when they had no fixed habitation, nor any
+need of each other's assistance; when the same persons scarcely met
+twice in their whole lives, and on meeting neither spoke to, or so
+much as knew each other?
+
+Let us consider how many ideas we owe to the use of speech; how much
+grammar exercises, and facilitates the operations of the mind; let us,
+besides, reflect on the immense pains and time that the first
+invention of languages must have required: Let us add these
+reflections to the preceding; and then we may judge how many thousand
+ages must have been requisite to develop successively the operations,
+which the human mind is capable of producing.
+
+I must now beg leave to stop one moment to consider the perplexities
+attending the origin of languages. I might here barely cite or repeat
+the researches made, in relation to this question, by the Abbe de
+Condillac, which all fully confirm my system, and perhaps even
+suggested to me the first idea of it. But, as the manner, in which the
+philosopher resolves the difficulties of his own starting, concerning
+the origin of arbitrary signs, shows that he supposes, what I doubt,
+namely a kind of society already established among the inventors of
+languages; I think it my duty, at the same time that I refer to his
+reflections, to give my own, in order to expose the same difficulties
+in a light suitable to my subject. The first that offers is how
+languages could become necessary; for as there was no correspondence
+between men, nor the least necessity for any, there is no conceiving
+the necessity of this invention, nor the possibility of it, if it was
+not indispensable. I might say, with many others, that languages are
+the fruit of the domestic intercourse between fathers, mothers, and
+children: but this, besides its not answering any difficulties, would
+be committing the same fault with those, who reasoning on the state of
+nature, transfer to it ideas collected in society, always consider
+families as living together under one roof, and their members as
+observing among themselves an union, equally intimate and permanent
+with that which we see exist in a civil state, where so many common
+interests conspire to unite them; whereas in this primitive state, as
+there were neither houses nor cabins, nor any kind of property, every
+one took up his lodging at random, and seldom continued above one
+night in the same place; males and females united without any
+premeditated design, as chance, occasion, or desire brought them
+together, nor had they any great occasion for language to make known
+their thoughts to each other. They parted with the same ease. The
+mother suckled her children, when just born, for her own sake; but
+afterwards out of love and affection to them, when habit and custom
+had made them dear to her; but they no sooner gained strength enough
+to run about in quest of food than they separated even from her of
+their own accord; and as they scarce had any other method of not
+losing each other, than that of remaining constantly in each other's
+sight, they soon came to such a pass of forgetfulness, as not even to
+know each other, when they happened to meet again. I must further
+observe that the child having all his wants to explain, and
+consequently more things to say to his mother, than the mother can
+have to say to him, it is he that must be at the chief expense of
+invention, and the language he makes use of must be in a great measure
+his own work; this makes the number of languages equal to that of the
+individuals who are to speak them; and this multiplicity of languages
+is further increased by their roving and vagabond kind of life, which
+allows no idiom time enough to acquire any consistency; for to say
+that the mother would have dictated to the child the words he must
+employ to ask her this thing and that, may well enough explain in what
+manner languages, already formed, are taught, but it does not show us
+in what manner they are first formed.
+
+Let us suppose this first difficulty conquered: Let us for a moment
+consider ourselves at this side of the immense space, which must have
+separated the pure state of nature from that in which languages became
+necessary, and let us, after allowing such necessity, examine how
+languages could begin to be established. A new difficulty this, still
+more stubborn than the preceding; for if men stood in need of speech
+to learn to think, they must have stood in still greater need of the
+art of thinking to invent that of speaking; and though we could
+conceive how the sounds of the voice came to be taken for the
+conventional interpreters of our ideas we should not be the nearer
+knowing who could have been the interpreters of this convention for
+such ideas, as, in consequence of their not having any sensible
+objects, could not be made manifest by gesture or voice; so that we
+can scarce form any tolerable conjectures concerning the birth of this
+art of communicating our thoughts, and establishing a correspondence
+between minds: a sublime art which, though so remote from its origin,
+philosophers still behold at such a prodigious distance from its
+perfection, that I never met with one of them bold enough to affirm it
+would ever arrive there, though the revolutions necessarily produced
+by time were suspended in its favour; though prejudice could be
+banished from, or would be at least content to sit silent in the
+presence of our academies, and though these societies should
+consecrate themselves, entirely and during whole ages, to the study of
+this intricate object.
+
+The first language of man, the most universal and most energetic of
+all languages, in short, the only language he had occasion for, before
+there was a necessity of persuading assembled multitudes, was the cry
+of nature. As this cry was never extorted but by a kind of instinct in
+the most urgent cases, to implore assistance in great danger, or
+relief in great sufferings, it was of little use in the common
+occurrences of life, where more moderate sentiments generally prevail.
+When the ideas of men began to extend and multiply, and a closer
+communication began to take place among them, they laboured to devise
+more numerous signs, and a more extensive language: they multiplied
+the inflections of the voice, and added to them gestures, which are,
+in their own nature, more expressive, and whose meaning depends less
+on any prior determination. They therefore expressed visible and
+movable objects by gestures and those which strike the ear, by
+imitative sounds: but as gestures scarcely indicate anything except
+objects that are actually present or can be easily described, and
+visible actions; as they are not of general use, since darkness or the
+interposition of an opaque medium renders them useless; and as besides
+they require attention rather than excite it: men at length bethought
+themselves of substituting for them the articulations of voice, which,
+without having the same relation to any determinate object, are, in
+quality of instituted signs, fitter to represent all our ideas; a
+substitution, which could only have been made by common consent, and
+in a manner pretty difficult to practise by men, whose rude organs
+were unimproved by exercise; a substitution, which is in itself more
+difficult to be conceived, since the motives to this unanimous
+agreement must have been somehow or another expressed, and speech
+therefore appears to have been exceedingly requisite to establish the
+use of speech.
+
+We must allow that the words, first made use of by men, had in their
+minds a much more extensive signification, than those employed in
+languages of some standing, and that, considering how ignorant they
+were of the division of speech into its constituent parts; they at
+first gave every word the meaning of an entire proposition. When
+afterwards they began to perceive the difference between the subject
+and attribute, and between verb and noun, a distinction which required
+no mean effort of genius, the substantives for a time were only so
+many proper names, the infinitive was the only tense, and as to
+adjectives, great difficulties must have attended the development of
+the idea that represents them, since every adjective is an abstract
+word, and abstraction is an unnatural and very painful operation.
+
+At first they gave every object a peculiar name, without any regard to
+its genus or species, things which these first institutors of language
+were in no condition to distinguish; and every individual presented
+itself solitary to their minds, as it stands in the table of nature.
+If they called one oak A, they called another oak B: so that their
+dictionary must have been more extensive in proportion as their
+knowledge of things was more confined. It could not but be a very
+difficult task to get rid of so diffuse and embarrassing a
+nomenclature; as in order to marshal the several beings under common
+and generic denominations, it was necessary to be first acquainted
+with their properties, and their differences; to be stocked with
+observations and definitions, that is to say, to understand natural
+history and metaphysics, advantages which the men of these times could
+not have enjoyed.
+
+Besides, general ideas cannot be conveyed to the mind without the
+assistance of words, nor can the understanding seize them without the
+assistance of propositions. This is one of the reasons, why mere
+animals cannot form such ideas, nor ever acquire the perfectibility
+which depends on such an operation. When a monkey leaves without the
+least hesitation one nut for another, are we to think he has any
+general idea of that kind of fruit, and that he compares these two
+individual bodies with his archetype notion of them? No, certainly;
+but the sight of one of these nuts calls back to his memory the
+sensations which he has received from the other; and his eyes,
+modified after some certain manner, give notice to his palate of the
+modification it is in its turn going to receive. Every general idea is
+purely intellectual; let the imagination tamper ever so little with
+it, it immediately becomes a particular idea. Endeavour to represent
+to yourself the image of a tree in general, you never will be able to
+do it; in spite of all your efforts it will appear big or little, thin
+or tufted, of a bright or a deep colour; and were you master to see
+nothing in it, but what can be seen in every tree, such a picture
+would no longer resemble any tree. Beings perfectly abstract are
+perceivable in the same manner, or are only conceivable by the
+assistance of speech. The definition of a triangle can alone give you
+a just idea of that figure: the moment you form a triangle in your
+mind, it is this or that particular triangle and no other, and you
+cannot avoid giving breadth to its lines and colour to its area. We
+must therefore make use of propositions; we must therefore speak to
+have general ideas; for the moment the imagination stops, the mind
+must stop too, if not assisted by speech. If therefore the first
+inventors could give no names to any ideas but those they had already,
+it follows that the first substantives could never have been anything
+more than proper names.
+
+But when by means, which I cannot conceive, our new grammarians began
+to extend their ideas, and generalize their words, the ignorance of
+the inventors must have confined this method to very narrow bounds;
+and as they had at first too much multiplied the names of individuals
+for want of being acquainted with the distinctions called genus and
+species, they afterwards made too few genera and species for want of
+having considered beings in all their differences; to push the
+divisions far enough, they must have had more knowledge and experience
+than we can allow them, and have made more researches and taken more
+pains, than we can suppose them willing to submit to. Now if, even at
+this present time, we every day discover new species, which had before
+escaped all our observations, how many species must have escaped the
+notice of men, who judged of things merely from their first
+appearances! As to the primitive classes and the most general notions,
+it were superfluous to add that these they must have likewise
+overlooked: how, for example, could they have thought of or understood
+the words, matter, spirit, substance, mode, figure, motion, since even
+our philosophers, who for so long a time have been constantly
+employing these terms, can themselves scarcely understand them, and
+since the ideas annexed to these words being purely metaphysical, no
+models of them could be found in nature?
+
+I stop at these first advances, and beseech my judges to suspend their
+lecture a little, in order to consider, what a great way language has
+still to go, in regard to the invention of physical substantives
+alone, (though the easiest part of language to invent,) to be able to
+express all the sentiments of man, to assume an invariable form, to
+bear being spoken in public and to influence society: I earnestly
+entreat them to consider how much time and knowledge must have been
+requisite to find out numbers, abstract words, the aorists, and all
+the other tenses of verbs, the particles, and syntax, the method of
+connecting propositions and arguments, of forming all the logic of
+discourse. For my own part, I am so scared at the difficulties that
+multiply at every step, and so convinced of the almost demonstrated
+impossibility of languages owing their birth and establishment to
+means that were merely human, that I must leave to whoever may please
+to take it up, the task of discussing this difficult problem. "Which
+was the most necessary, society already formed to invent languages, or
+languages already invented to form society?"
+
+But be the case of these origins ever so mysterious, we may at least
+infer from the little care which nature has taken to bring men
+together by mutual wants, and make the use of speech easy to them, how
+little she has done towards making them sociable, and how little she
+has contributed to anything which they themselves have done to become
+so. In fact, it is impossible to conceive, why, in this primitive
+state, one man should have more occasion for the assistance of
+another, than one monkey, or one wolf for that of another animal of
+the same species; or supposing that he had, what motive could induce
+another to assist him; or even, in this last case, how he, who wanted
+assistance, and he from whom it was wanted, could agree among
+themselves upon the conditions. Authors, I know, are continually
+telling us, that in this state man would have been a most miserable
+creature; and if it is true, as I fancy I have proved it, that he must
+have continued many ages without either the desire or the opportunity
+of emerging from such a state, this their assertion could only serve
+to justify a charge against nature, and not any against the being
+which nature had thus constituted; but, if I thoroughly understand
+this term miserable, it is a word, that either has no meaning, or
+signifies nothing, but a privation attended with pain, and a suffering
+state of body or soul; now I would fain know what kind of misery can
+be that of a free being, whose heart enjoys perfect peace, and body
+perfect health? And which is aptest to become insupportable to those
+who enjoy it, a civil or a natural life? In civil life we can scarcely
+meet a single person who does not complain of his existence; many even
+throw away as much of it as they can, and the united force of divine
+and human laws can hardly put bounds to this disorder. Was ever any
+free savage known to have been so much as tempted to complain of life,
+and lay violent hands on himself? Let us therefore judge with less
+pride on which side real misery is to be placed. Nothing, on the
+contrary, must have been so unhappy as savage man, dazzled by flashes
+of knowledge, racked by passions, and reasoning on a state different
+from that in which he saw himself placed. It was in consequence of a
+very wise Providence, that the faculties, which he potentially
+enjoyed, were not to develop themselves but in proportion as there
+offered occasions to exercise them, lest they should be superfluous or
+troublesome to him when he did not want them, or tardy and useless
+when he did. He had in his instinct alone everything requisite to live
+in a state of nature; in his cultivated reason he has barely what is
+necessary to live in a state of society.
+
+It appears at first sight that, as there was no kind of moral
+relations between men in this state, nor any known duties, they could
+not be either good or bad, and had neither vices nor virtues, unless
+we take these words in a physical sense, and call vices, in the
+individual, the qualities which may prove detrimental to his own
+preservation, and virtues those which may contribute to it; in which
+case we should be obliged to consider him as most virtuous, who made
+least resistance against the simple impulses of nature. But without
+deviating from the usual meaning of these terms, it is proper to
+suspend the judgment we might form of such a situation, and be upon
+our guard against prejudice, till, the balance in hand, we have
+examined whether there are more virtues or vices among civilized men;
+or whether the improvement of their understanding is sufficient to
+compensate the damage which they mutually do to each other, in
+proportion as they become better informed of the services which they
+ought to do; or whether, upon the whole, they would not be much
+happier in a condition, where they had nothing to fear or to hope from
+each other, than in that where they had submitted to an universal
+subserviency, and have obliged themselves to depend for everything
+upon the good will of those, who do not think themselves obliged to
+give anything in return.
+
+But above all things let us beware concluding with Hobbes, that man,
+as having no idea of goodness, must be naturally bad; that he is
+vicious because he does not know what virtue is; that he always
+refuses to do any service to those of his own species, because he
+believes that none is due to them; that, in virtue of that right which
+he justly claims to everything he wants, he foolishly looks upon
+himself as proprietor of the whole universe. Hobbes very plainly saw
+the flaws in all the modern definitions of natural right: but the
+consequences, which he draws from his own definition, show that it is,
+in the sense he understands it, equally exceptionable. This author, to
+argue from his own principles, should say that the state of nature,
+being that where the care of our own preservation interferes least
+with the preservation of others, was of course the most favourable to
+peace, and most suitable to mankind; whereas he advances the very
+reverse in consequence of his having injudiciously admitted, as
+objects of that care which savage man should take of his preservation,
+the satisfaction of numberless passions which are the work of society,
+and have rendered laws necessary. A bad man, says he, is a robust
+child. But this is not proving that savage man is a robust child; and
+though we were to grant that he was, what could this philosopher infer
+from such a concession? That if this man, when robust, depended on
+others as much as when feeble, there is no excess that he would not be
+guilty of. He would make nothing of striking his mother when she
+delayed ever so little to give him the breast; he would claw, and
+bite, and strangle without remorse the first of his younger brothers,
+that ever so accidentally jostled or otherwise disturbed him. But
+these are two contradictory suppositions in the state of nature, to be
+robust and dependent. Man is weak when dependent, and his own master
+before he grows robust. Hobbes did not consider that the same cause,
+which hinders savages from making use of their reason, as our
+jurisconsults pretend, hinders them at the same time from making an
+ill use of their faculties, as he himself pretends; so that we may say
+that savages are not bad, precisely because they don't know what it is
+to be good; for it is neither the development of the understanding,
+nor the curb of the law, but the calmness of their passions and their
+ignorance of vice that hinders them from doing ill: _tantus plus in
+illis proficit vitiorum ignorantia, quam in his cognito virtutis_.
+There is besides another principle that has escaped Hobbes, and which,
+having been given to man to moderate, on certain occasions, the blind
+and impetuous sallies of self-love, or the desire of self-preservation
+previous to the appearance of that passion, allays the ardour, with
+which he naturally pursues his private welfare, by an innate
+abhorrence to see beings suffer that resemble him. I shall not surely
+be contradicted, in granting to man the only natural virtue, which the
+most passionate detractor of human virtues could not deny him, I mean
+that of pity, a disposition suitable to creatures weak as we are, and
+liable to so many evils; a virtue so much the more universal, and
+withal useful to man, as it takes place in him of all manner of
+reflection; and so natural, that the beasts themselves sometimes give
+evident signs of it. Not to speak of the tenderness of mothers for
+their young; and of the dangers they face to screen them from danger;
+with what reluctance are horses known to trample upon living bodies;
+one animal never passes unmoved by the dead carcass of another animal
+of the same species: there are even some who bestow a kind of
+sepulture upon their dead fellows; and the mournful lowings of cattle,
+on their entering the slaughter-house, publish the impression made
+upon them by the horrible spectacle they are there struck with. It is
+with pleasure we see the author of the fable of the bees, forced to
+acknowledge man a compassionate and sensible being; and lay aside, in
+the example he offers to confirm it, his cold and subtle style, to
+place before us the pathetic picture of a man, who, with his hands
+tied up, is obliged to behold a beast of prey tear a child from the
+arms of his mother, and then with his teeth grind the tender limbs,
+and with his claws rend the throbbing entrails of the innocent victim.
+What horrible emotions must not such a spectator experience at the
+sight of an event which does not personally concern him? What anguish
+must he not suffer at his not being able to assist the fainting mother
+or the expiring infant?
+
+Such is the pure motion of nature, anterior to all manner of
+reflection; such is the force of natural pity, which the most
+dissolute manners have as yet found it so difficult to extinguish,
+since we every day see, in our theatrical representation, those men
+sympathize with the unfortunate and weep at their sufferings, who, if
+in the tyrant's place, would aggravate the torments of their enemies.
+Mandeville was very sensible that men, in spite of all their morality,
+would never have been better than monsters, if nature had not given
+them pity to assist reason: but he did not perceive that from this
+quality alone flow all the social virtues, which he would dispute
+mankind the possession of. In fact, what is generosity, what clemency,
+what humanity, but pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or to the
+human species in general? Even benevolence and friendship, if we judge
+right, will appear the effects of a constant pity, fixed upon a
+particular object: for to wish that a person may not suffer, what is
+it but to wish that he may be happy? Though it were true that
+commiseration is no more than a sentiment, which puts us in the place
+of him who suffers, a sentiment obscure but active in the savage,
+developed but dormant in civilized man, how could this notion affect
+the truth of what I advance, but to make it more evident. In fact,
+commiseration must be so much the more energetic, the more intimately
+the animal, that beholds any kind of distress, identifies himself with
+the animal that labours under it. Now it is evident that this
+identification must have been infinitely more perfect in the state of
+nature than in the state of reason. It is reason that engenders
+self-love, and reflection that strengthens it; it is reason that makes
+man shrink into himself; it is reason that makes him keep aloof from
+everything that can trouble or afflict him: it is philosophy that
+destroys his connections with other men; it is in consequence of her
+dictates that he mutters to himself at the sight of another in
+distress, You may perish for aught I care, nothing can hurt me.
+Nothing less than those evils, which threaten the whole species, can
+disturb the calm sleep of the philosopher, and force him from his bed.
+One man may with impunity murder another under his windows; he has
+nothing to do but clap his hands to his ears, argue a little with
+himself to hinder nature, that startles within him, from identifying
+him with the unhappy sufferer. Savage man wants this admirable talent;
+and for want of wisdom and reason, is always ready foolishly to obey
+the first whispers of humanity. In riots and street-brawls the
+populace flock together, the prudent man sneaks off. They are the
+dregs of the people, the poor basket and barrow-women, that part the
+combatants, and hinder gentle folks from cutting one another's
+throats.
+
+It is therefore 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 whole species. It is this pity
+which hurries us without reflection to the assistance of those we see
+in distress; it is this pity which, in a state of nature, stands for
+laws, for manners, for virtue, with this advantage, that no one is
+tempted to disobey her sweet and gentle voice: it is this pity which
+will always hinder a robust savage from plundering a feeble child, or
+infirm old man, of the subsistence they have acquired with pain and
+difficulty, if he has but the least prospect of providing for himself
+by any other means: it is this pity which, instead of that sublime
+maxim of argumentative justice, Do to others as you would have others
+do to you, inspires all men with that other maxim of natural goodness
+a great deal less perfect, but perhaps more useful, Consult your own
+happiness with as little prejudice as you can to that of others. It is
+in a word, in this natural sentiment, rather than in fine-spun
+arguments, that we must look for the cause of that reluctance which
+every man would experience to do evil, even independently of the
+maxims of education. Though it may be the peculiar happiness of
+Socrates and other geniuses of his stamp, to reason themselves into
+virtue, the human species would long ago have ceased to exist, had it
+depended entirely for its preservation on the reasonings of the
+individuals that compose it.
+
+With passions so tame, and so salutary a curb, men, rather wild than
+wicked, and more attentive to guard against mischief than to do any to
+other animals, were not exposed to any dangerous dissensions: As they
+kept up no manner of correspondence with each other, and were of
+course strangers to vanity, to respect, to esteem, to contempt; as
+they had no notion of what we call Meum and Tuum, nor any true idea of
+justice; as they considered any violence they were liable to, as an
+evil that could be easily repaired, and not as an injury that deserved
+punishment; and as they never so much as dreamed of revenge, unless
+perhaps mechanically and unpremeditatedly, as a dog who bites the
+stone that has been thrown at him; their disputes could seldom be
+attended with bloodshed, were they never occasioned by a more
+considerable stake than that of subsistence: but there is a more
+dangerous subject of contention, which I must not leave unnoticed.
+
+Among the passions which ruffle the heart of man, there is one of a
+hot and impetuous nature, which renders the sexes necessary to each
+other; a terrible passion which despises all dangers, bears down all
+obstacles, and to which in its transports it seems proper to destroy
+the human species which it is destined to preserve. What must become
+of men abandoned to this lawless and brutal rage, without modesty,
+without shame, and every day disputing the objects of their passion at
+the expense of their blood?
+
+We must in the first place allow that the more violent the passions,
+the more necessary are laws to restrain them: but besides that the
+disorders and the crimes, to which these passions daily give rise
+among us, sufficiently grove the insufficiency of laws for that
+purpose, we would do well to look back a little further and examine,
+if these evils did not spring up with the laws themselves; for at this
+rate, though the laws were capable of repressing these evils, it is
+the least that might be expected from them, seeing it is no more than
+stopping the progress of a mischief which they themselves have
+produced.
+
+Let us begin by distinguishing between what is moral and what is
+physical in the passion called love. The physical part of it is that
+general desire which prompts the sexes to unite with each other; the
+moral part is that which determines that desire, and fixes it upon a
+particular object to the exclusion of all others, or at least gives it
+a greater degree of energy for this preferred object. Now it is easy
+to perceive that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment,
+engendered by society, and cried up by the women with great care and
+address in order to establish their empire, and secure command to that
+sex which ought to obey. This sentiment, being founded on certain
+notions of beauty and merit which a savage is not capable of having,
+and upon comparisons which he is not capable of making, can scarcely
+exist in him: for as his mind was never in a condition to form
+abstract ideas of regularity and proportion, neither is his heart
+susceptible of sentiments of admiration and love, which, even without
+our perceiving it, are produced by our application of these ideas; he
+listens solely to the dispositions implanted in him by nature, and not
+to taste which he never was in a way of acquiring; and every woman
+answers his purpose.
+
+Confined entirely to what is physical in love, and happy enough not to
+know these preferences which sharpen the appetite for it, at the same
+time that they increase the difficulty of satisfying such appetite,
+men, in a state of nature, must be subject to fewer and less violent
+fits of that passion, and of course there must be fewer and less
+violent disputes among them in consequence of it. The imagination
+which causes so many ravages among us, never speaks to the heart of
+savages, who peaceably wait for the impulses of nature, yield to these
+impulses without choice and with more pleasure than fury; and whose
+desires never outlive their necessity for the thing desired.
+
+Nothing therefore can be more evident, than that it is society alone,
+which has added even to love itself as well as to all the other
+passions, that impetuous ardour, which so often renders it fatal to
+mankind; and it is so much the more ridiculous to represent savages
+constantly murdering each other to glut their brutality, as this
+opinion is diametrically opposite to experience, and the Caribbeans,
+the people in the world who have as yet deviated least from the state
+of nature, are to all intents and purposes the most peaceable in their
+amours, and the least subject to jealousy, though they live in a
+burning climate which seems always to add considerably to the activity
+of these passions.
+
+As to the inductions which may be drawn, in respect to several species
+of animals, from the battles of the males, who in all seasons cover
+our poultry yards with blood, and in spring particularly cause our
+forests to ring again with the noise they make in disputing their
+females, we must begin by excluding all those species, where nature
+has evidently established, in the relative power of the sexes,
+relations different from those which exist among us: thus from the
+battle of cocks we can form no induction that will affect the human
+species. In the species, where the proportion is better observed,
+these battles must be owing entirely to the fewness of the females
+compared with the males, or, which is all one, to the exclusive
+intervals, during which the females constantly refuse the addresses of
+the males; for if the female admits the male but two months in the
+year, it is all the same as if the number of females were five-sixths
+less than what it is: now neither of these cases is applicable to the
+human species, where the number of females generally surpasses that of
+males, and where it has never been observed that, even among savages,
+the females had, like those of other animals, stated times of passion
+and indifference, Besides, among several of these animals the whole
+species takes fire all at once, and for some days nothing is, to be
+seen among them but confusion, tumult, disorder and bloodshed; a state
+unknown to the human species where love is never periodical. We can
+not therefore conclude from the battles of certain animals for the
+possession of their females, that the same would be the case of man in
+a state of nature; and though we might, as these contests do not
+destroy the other species, there is at least equal room to think they
+would not be fatal to ours; nay it is very probable that they would
+cause fewer ravages than they do in society, especially in those
+countries where, morality being as yet held in some esteem, the
+jealousy of lovers, and the vengeance of husbands every day produce
+duels, murders and even worse crimes; where the duty of an eternal
+fidelity serves only to propagate adultery; and the very laws of
+continence and honour necessarily contribute to increase
+dissoluteness, and multiply abortions.
+
+Let us conclude that savage man, wandering about in the forests,
+without industry, without speech, without any fixed residence, an
+equal stranger to war and every social connection, without standing in
+any shape in need of his fellows, as well as without any desire of
+hurting them, and perhaps even without ever distinguishing them
+individually one from the other, subject to few passions, and finding
+in himself all he wants, let us, I say, conclude that savage man thus
+circumstanced had no knowledge or sentiment but such as are proper to
+that condition, that he was alone sensible of his real necessities,
+took notice of nothing but what it was his interest to see, and that
+his understanding made as little progress as his vanity. If he
+happened to make any discovery, he could the less communicate it as he
+did not even know his children. The art perished with the inventor;
+there was neither education nor improvement; generations succeeded
+generations to no purpose; and as all constantly set out from the same
+point, whole centuries rolled on in the rudeness and barbarity of the
+first age; the species was grown old, while the individual still
+remained in a state of childhood.
+
+If I have enlarged so much upon the supposition of this primitive
+condition, it is because I thought it my duty, considering what
+ancient errors and inveterate prejudices I have to extirpate, to dig
+to the very roots, and show in a true picture of the state of nature,
+how much even natural inequality falls short in this state of that
+reality and influence which our writers ascribe to it.
+
+In fact, we may easily perceive that among the differences, which
+distinguish men, several pass for natural, which are merely the work
+of habit and the different kinds of life adopted by men living in a
+social way. Thus a robust or delicate constitution, and the strength
+and weakness which depend on it, are oftener produced by the hardy or
+effeminate manner in which a man has been brought up, than by the
+primitive constitution of his body. It is the same thus in regard to
+the forces of the mind; and education not only produces a difference
+between those minds which are cultivated and those which are not, but
+even increases that which is found among the first in proportion to
+their culture; for let a giant and a dwarf set out in the same path,
+the giant at every step will acquire a new advantage over the dwarf.
+Now, if we compare the prodigious variety in the education and manner
+of living of the different orders of men in a civil state, with the
+simplicity and uniformity that prevails in the animal and savage life,
+where all the individuals make use of the same aliments, live in the
+same manner, and do exactly the same things, we shall easily conceive
+how much the difference between man and man in the state of nature
+must be less than in the state of society, and how much every
+inequality of institution must increase the natural inequalities of
+the human species.
+
+But though nature in the distribution of her gifts should really
+affect all the preferences that are ascribed to her, what advantage
+could the most favoured derive from her partiality, to the prejudice
+of others, in a state of things, which scarce admitted any kind of
+relation between her pupils? Of what service can beauty be, where
+there is no love? What will wit avail people who don't speak, or craft
+those who have no affairs to transact? Authors are constantly crying
+out, that the strongest would oppress the weakest; but let them
+explain what they mean by the word oppression. One man will rule with
+violence, another will groan under a constant subjection to all his
+caprices: this is indeed precisely what I observe among us, but I
+don't see how it can be said of savage men, into whose heads it would
+be a harder matter to drive even the meaning of the words domination
+and servitude. One man might, indeed, seize on the fruits which
+another had gathered, on the game which another had killed, on the
+cavern which another had occupied for shelter; but how is it possible
+he should ever exact obedience from him, and what chains of dependence
+can there be among men who possess nothing? If I am driven from one
+tree, I have nothing to do but look out for another; if one place is
+made uneasy to me, what can hinder me from taking up my quarters
+elsewhere? But suppose I should meet a man so much superior to me in
+strength, and withal so wicked, so lazy and so barbarous as to oblige
+me to provide for his subsistence while he remains idle; he must
+resolve not to take his eyes from me a single moment, to bind me fast
+before he can take the least nap, lest I should kill him or give him
+the slip during his sleep: that is to say, he must expose himself
+voluntarily to much greater troubles than what he seeks to avoid, than
+any he gives me. And after all, let him abate ever so little of his
+vigilance; let him at some sudden noise but turn his head another way;
+I am already buried in the forest, my fetters are broke, and he never
+sees me again.
+
+But without insisting any longer upon these details, every one must
+see that, as the bonds of servitude are formed merely by the mutual
+dependence of men one upon another and the reciprocal necessities
+which unite them, it is impossible for one man to enslave another,
+without having first reduced him to a condition in which he can not
+live without the enslaver's assistance; a condition which, as it does
+not exist in a state of nature, must leave every man his own master,
+and render the law of the strongest altogether vain and useless.
+
+Having proved that the inequality, which may subsist between man and
+man in a state of nature, is almost imperceivable, and that it has
+very little influence, I must now proceed to show its origin, and
+trace its progress, in the successive developments of the human mind.
+After having showed, that perfectibility, the social virtues, and the
+other faculties, which natural man had received _in potentia_, could
+never be developed of themselves, that for that purpose there was a
+necessity for the fortuitous concurrence of several foreign causes,
+which might never happen, and without which he must have eternally
+remained in his primitive condition; I must proceed to consider and
+bring together the different accidents which may have perfected the
+human understanding by debasing the species, render a being wicked by
+rendering him sociable, and from so remote a term bring man at last
+and the world to the point in which we now see them.
+
+I must own that, as the events I am about to describe might have
+happened many different ways, my choice of these I shall assign can be
+grounded on nothing but mere conjecture; but besides these conjectures
+becoming reasons, when they are not only the most probable that can be
+drawn from the nature of things, but the only means we can have of
+discovering truth, the consequences I mean to deduce from mine will
+not be merely conjectural, since, on the principles I have just
+established, it is impossible to form any other system, that would not
+supply me with the same results, and from which I might not draw the
+same conclusions.
+
+This will authorize me to be the more concise in my reflections on the
+manner, in which the lapse of time makes amends for the little
+verisimilitude of events; on the surprising power of very trivial
+causes, when they act without intermission; on the impossibility there
+is on the one hand of destroying certain Hypotheses, if on the other
+we can not give them the degree of certainty which facts must be
+allowed to possess; on its being the business of history, when two
+facts are proposed, as real, to be connected by a chain of
+intermediate facts which are either unknown or considered as such, to
+furnish such facts as may actually connect them; and the business of
+philosophy, when history is silent, to point out similar facts which
+may answer the same purpose; in fine on the privilege of similitude,
+in regard to events, to reduce facts to a much smaller number of
+different classes than is generally imagined. It suffices me to offer
+these objects to the consideration of my judges; it suffices me to
+have conducted my inquiry in such a manner as to save common readers
+the trouble of considering them.
+
+
+
+
+SECOND PART
+
+The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into
+his head to say, "This is mine," and found people simple enough to
+believe him, was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes,
+how many wars, how many murders, how many misfortunes and horrors,
+would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes
+or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Be sure
+not to listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the
+fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to
+nobody! But it is highly probable that things were now come to such a
+pass, that they could not continue much longer in the same way; for as
+this idea of property depends on several prior ideas which could only
+spring up gradually one after another, it was not formed all at once
+in the human mind: men must have made great progress; they must have
+acquired a great stock of industry and knowledge, and transmitted and
+increased it from age to age before they could arrive at this last
+term of the state of nature. Let us therefore take up things a little
+higher, and collect into one point of view, and in their most natural
+order, this slow succession of events and mental improvements.
+
+The first sentiment of man was that of his existence, his first care
+that of preserving it. The productions of the earth yielded him all
+the assistance he required; instinct prompted him to make use of them.
+Among the various appetites, which made him at different times
+experience different modes of existence, there was one that excited
+him to perpetuate his species; and this blind propensity, quite void
+of anything like pure love or affection, produced nothing but an act
+that was merely animal. The present heat once allayed, the sexes took
+no further notice of each other, and even the child ceased to have any
+tie in his mother, the moment he ceased to want her assistance.
+
+Such was the condition of infant man; such was the life of an animal
+confined at first to pure sensations, and so far from harbouring any
+thought of forcing her gifts from nature, that he scarcely availed
+himself of those which she offered to him of her own accord. But
+difficulties soon arose, and there was a necessity for learning how to
+surmount them: the height of some trees, which prevented his reaching
+their fruits; the competition of other animals equally fond of the
+same fruits; the fierceness of many that even aimed at his life; these
+were so many circumstances, which obliged him to apply to bodily
+exercise. There was a necessity for becoming active, swift-footed, and
+sturdy in battle. The natural arms, which are stones and the branches
+of trees, soon offered themselves to his assistance. He learned to
+surmount the obstacles of nature, to contend in case of necessity with
+other animals, to dispute his subsistence even with other men, or
+indemnify himself for the loss of whatever he found himself obliged to
+part with to the strongest.
+
+In proportion as the human species grew more numerous, and extended
+itself, its pains likewise multiplied and increased. The difference
+of soils, climates and seasons, might have forced men to observe some
+difference in their way of living. Bad harvests, long and severe
+winters, and scorching summers which parched up all the fruits of the
+earth, required extraordinary exertions of industry. On the sea shore,
+and the banks of rivers, they invented the line and the hook, and
+became fishermen and ichthyophagous. In the forests they made
+themselves bows and arrows, and became huntsmen and warriors. In the
+cold countries they covered themselves with the skins of the beasts
+they had killed; thunder, a volcano, or some happy accident made them
+acquainted with fire, a new resource against the rigours of winter:
+they discovered the method of preserving this element, then that of
+reproducing it, and lastly the way of preparing with it the flesh of
+animals, which heretofore they devoured raw from the carcass.
+
+This reiterated application of various beings to himself, and to one
+another, must have naturally engendered in the mind of man the idea of
+certain relations. These relations, which we express by the words,
+great, little, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold, and the like,
+compared occasionally, and almost without thinking of it, produced in
+him some kind of reflection, or rather a mechanical prudence, which
+pointed out to him the precautions most essential to his preservation
+and safety.
+
+The new lights resulting from this development increased his
+superiority over other animals, by making him sensible of it. He laid
+himself out to ensnare them; he played them a thousand tricks; and
+though several surpassed him in strength or in swiftness, he in time
+became the master of those that could be of any service to him, and a
+sore enemy to those that could do him any mischief. 'Tis thus, that
+the first look he gave into himself produced the first emotion of
+pride in him; 'tis thus that, at a time he scarce knew how to
+distinguish between the different ranks of existence, by attributing
+to his species the first rank among animals in general, he prepared
+himself at a distance to pretend to it as an individual among those of
+his own species in particular.
+
+Though other men were not to him what they are to us, and he had
+scarce more intercourse with them than with other animals, they were
+not overlooked in his observations. The conformities, which in time
+he might discover between them, and between himself and his female,
+made him judge of those he did not perceive; and seeing that they all
+behaved as himself would have done in similar circumstances, he
+concluded that their manner of thinking and willing was quite
+conformable to his own; and this important truth, when once engraved
+deeply on his mind, made him follow, by a presentiment as sure as any
+logic, and withal much quicker, the best rules of conduct, which for
+the sake of his own safety and advantage it was proper he should
+observe towards them.
+
+Instructed by experience that the love of happiness is the sole
+principle of all human actions, he found himself in a condition to
+distinguish the few cases, in which common interest might authorize
+him to build upon the assistance of his fellows, and those still
+fewer, in which a competition of interests might justly render it
+suspected. In the first case he united with them in the same flock, or
+at most by some kind of free association which obliged none of its
+members, and lasted no longer than the transitory necessity that had
+given birth to it. In the second case every one aimed at his own
+private advantage, either by open force if he found himself strong
+enough, or by cunning and address if he thought himself too weak to
+use violence.
+
+Such was the manner in which men might have insensibly acquired some
+gross idea of their mutual engagements and the advantage of fulfilling
+them, but this only as far as their present and sensible interest
+required; for as to foresight they were utter strangers to it, and far
+from troubling their heads about a distant futurity, they scarce
+thought of the day following. Was a deer to be taken? Every one saw
+that to succeed he must faithfully stand to his post; but suppose a
+hare to have slipped by within reach of any one of them, it is not to
+be doubted but he pursued it without scruple, and when he had seized
+his prey never reproached himself with having made his companions miss
+theirs.
+
+We may easily conceive that such an intercourse scarce required a more
+refined language than that of crows and monkeys, which flock together
+almost in the same manner. Inarticulate exclamations, a great many
+gestures, and some imitative sounds, must have been for a long time
+the universal language of mankind, and by joining to these in every
+country some articulate and conventional sounds, of which, as I have
+already hinted, it is not very easy to explain the institution, there
+arose particular languages, but rude, imperfect, and such nearly as
+are to be found at this day among several savage nations. My pen
+straightened by the rapidity of time, the abundance of things I have
+to say, and the almost insensible progress of the first improvements,
+flies like an arrow over numberless ages, for the slower the
+succession of events, the quicker I may allow myself to be in relating
+them.
+
+At length, these first improvements enabled man to improve at a
+greater rate. Industry grew perfect in proportion as the mind became
+more enlightened. Men soon ceasing to fall asleep under the first
+tree, or take shelter in the first cavern, lit upon some hard and
+sharp kinds of stone resembling spades or hatchets, and employed them
+to dig the ground, cut down trees, and with the branches build huts,
+which they afterwards bethought themselves of plastering over with
+clay or dirt. This was the epoch of a first revolution, which produced
+the establishment and distinction of families, and which introduced a
+species of property, and along with it perhaps a thousand quarrels and
+battles. As the strongest however were probably the first to make
+themselves cabins, which they knew they were able to defend, we may
+conclude that the weak found it much shorter and safer to imitate than
+to attempt to dislodge them: and as to those, who were already
+provided with cabins, no one could have any great temptation to seize
+upon that of his neighbour, not so much because it did not belong to
+him, as because it could be of no service to him; and as besides to
+make himself master of it, he must expose himself to a very sharp
+conflict with the present occupiers.
+
+The first developments of the heart were the effects of a new
+situation, which united husbands and wives, parents and children,
+under one roof; the habit of living together gave birth to the
+sweetest sentiments the human species is acquainted with, conjugal and
+paternal love. Every family became a little society, so much the more
+firmly united, as a mutual attachment and liberty were the only bonds
+of it; and it was now that the sexes, whose way of life had been
+hitherto the same, began to adopt different manners and customs. The
+women became more sedentary, and accustomed themselves to stay at home
+and look after the children, while the men rambled abroad in quest of
+subsistence for the whole family. The two sexes likewise by living a
+little more at their ease began to lose somewhat of their usual
+ferocity and sturdiness; but if on the one hand individuals became
+less able to engage separately with wild beasts, they on the other
+were more easily got together to make a common resistance against
+them.
+
+In this new state of things, the simplicity and solitariness of man's
+life, the limitedness of his wants, and the instruments which he had
+invented to satisfy them, leaving him a great deal of leisure, he
+employed it to supply himself with several conveniences unknown to his
+ancestors; and this was the first yoke he inadvertently imposed upon
+himself, and the first source of mischief which he prepared for his
+children; for besides continuing in this manner to soften both body
+and mind, these conveniences having through use lost almost all their
+aptness to please, and even degenerated into real wants, the privation
+of them became far more intolerable than the possession of them had
+been agreeable; to lose them was a misfortune, to possess them no
+happiness.
+
+Here we may a little better discover how the use of speech insensibly
+commences or improves in the bosom of every family, and may likewise
+from conjectures concerning the manner in which divers particular
+causes might have propagated language, and accelerated its progress by
+rendering it every day more and more necessary. Great inundations or
+earthquakes surrounded inhabited districts with water or precipices,
+portions of the continent were by revolutions of the globe torn off
+and split into islands. It is obvious that among men thus collected,
+and forced to live together, a common idiom must have started up much
+sooner, than among those who freely wandered through the forests of
+the main land. Thus it is very possible that the inhabitants of the
+islands formed in this manner, after their first essays in navigation,
+brought among us the use of speech; and it is very probable at least
+that society and languages commenced in islands and even acquired
+perfection there, before the inhabitants of the continent knew
+anything of either.
+
+Everything now begins to wear a new aspect. Those who heretofore
+wandered through the woods, by taking to a more settled way of life,
+gradually flock together, coalesce into several separate bodies, and
+at length form in every country distinct nations, united in character
+and manners, not by any laws or regulations, but by an uniform manner
+of life, a sameness of provisions, and the common influence of the
+climate. A permanent neighborhood must at last infallibly create some
+connection between different families. The transitory commerce
+required by nature soon produced, among the youth of both sexes living
+in contiguous cabins, another kind of commerce, which besides being
+equally agreeable is rendered more durable by mutual intercourse. Men
+begin to consider different objects, and to make comparisons; they
+insensibly acquire ideas of merit and beauty, and these soon produce
+sentiments of preference. By seeing each other often they contract a
+habit, which makes it painful not to see each other always. Tender and
+agreeable sentiments steal into the soul, and are by the smallest
+opposition wound up into the most impetuous fury: Jealousy kindles
+with love; discord triumphs; and the gentlest of passions requires
+sacrifices of human blood to appease it.
+
+In proportion as ideas and sentiments succeed each other, and the head
+and the heart exercise themselves, men continue to shake off their
+original wildness, and their connections become more intimate and
+extensive. They now begin to assemble round a great tree: singing and
+dancing, the genuine offspring of love and leisure, become the
+amusement or rather the occupation of the men and women, free from
+care, thus gathered together. Every one begins to survey the rest, and
+wishes to be surveyed himself; and public esteem acquires a value. He
+who sings or dances best; the handsomest, the strongest, the most
+dexterous, the most eloquent, comes to be the most respected: this was
+the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice.
+From these first preferences there proceeded on one side vanity and
+contempt, on the other envy and shame; and the fermentation raised by
+these new leavens at length produced combinations fatal to happiness
+and innocence.
+
+Men no sooner began to set a value upon each other, and know what
+esteem was, than each laid claim to it, and it was no longer safe for
+any man to refuse it to another. Hence the first duties of civility
+and politeness, even among savages; and hence every voluntary injury
+became an affront, as besides the mischief, which resulted from it as
+an injury, the party offended was sure to find in it a contempt for
+his person more intolerable than the mischief itself. It was thus that
+every man, punishing the contempt expressed for him by others in
+proportion to the value he set upon himself, the effects of revenge
+became terrible, and men learned to be sanguinary and cruel. Such
+precisely was the degree attained by most of the savage nations with
+whom we are acquainted. And it is for want of sufficiently
+distinguishing ideas, and observing at how great a distance these
+people were from the first state of nature, that so many authors have
+hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel, and requires a regular
+system of police to be reclaimed; whereas nothing can be more gentle
+than he in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal
+distance from the stupidity of brutes, and the pernicious good sense
+of civilized man; and equally confined by instinct and reason to the
+care of providing against the mischief which threatens him, he is
+withheld by natural compassion from doing any injury to others, so far
+from being ever so little prone even to return that which he has
+received. For according to the axiom of the wise Locke, Where there is
+no property, there can be no injury.
+
+But we must take notice, that the society now formed and the relations
+now established among men required in them qualities different from
+those, which they derived from their primitive constitution; that as a
+sense of morality began to insinuate itself into human actions, and
+every man, before the enacting of laws, was the only judge and avenger
+of the injuries he had received, that goodness of heart suitable to
+the pure state of nature by no means suited infant society; that it
+was necessary punishments should become severer in the same proportion
+that the opportunities of offending became more frequent, and the
+dread of vengeance add strength to the too weak curb of the law. Thus,
+though men were become less patient, and natural compassion had
+already suffered some alteration, this period of the development of
+the human faculties, holding a just mean between the indolence of the
+primitive state, and the petulant activity of self-love, must have
+been the happiest and most durable epoch. The more we reflect on this
+state, the more convinced we shall be, that it was the least subject
+of any to revolutions, the best for man, and that nothing could have
+drawn him out of it but some fatal accident, which, for the public
+good, should never have happened. The example of the savages, most of
+whom have been found in this condition, seems to confirm that mankind
+was formed ever to remain in it, that this condition is the real youth
+of the world, and that all ulterior improvements have been so many
+steps, in appearance towards the perfection of individuals, but in
+fact towards the decrepitness of the species.
+
+As long as men remained satisfied with their rustic cabins; as long as
+they confined themselves to the use of clothes made of the skins of
+other animals, and the use of thorns and fish-bones, in putting these
+skins together; as long as they continued to consider feathers and
+shells as sufficient ornaments, and to paint their bodies of different
+colours, to improve or ornament their bows and arrows, to form and
+scoop out with sharp-edged stones some little fishing boats, or clumsy
+instruments of music; in a word, as long as they undertook such works
+only as a single person could finish, and stuck to such arts as did
+not require the joint endeavours of several hands, they lived free,
+healthy, honest and happy, as much as their nature would admit, and
+continued to enjoy with each other all the pleasures of an independent
+intercourse; but from the moment one man began to stand in need of
+another's assistance; from the moment it appeared an advantage for one
+man to possess the quantity of provisions requisite for two, all
+equality vanished; property started up; labour became necessary; and
+boundless forests became smiling fields, which it was found necessary
+to water with human sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon
+seen to sprout out and grow with the fruits of the earth.
+
+Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts whose invention produced
+this great revolution. With the poet, it is gold and silver, but with
+the philosopher it is iron and corn, which have civilized men, and
+ruined mankind. Accordingly both one and the other were unknown to the
+savages of America, who for that very reason have always continued
+savages; nay other nations seem to have continued in a state of
+barbarism, as long as they continued to exercise one only of these
+arts without the other; and perhaps one of the best reasons that can
+be assigned, why Europe has been, if not earlier, at least more
+constantly and better civilized than the other quarters of the world,
+is that she both abounds most in iron and is best qualified to
+produce corn.
+
+It is a very difficult matter to tell how men came to know anything of
+iron, and the art of employing it: for we are not to suppose that they
+should of themselves think of digging it out of the mines, and
+preparing it for fusion, before they knew what could be the result of
+such a process. On the other hand, there is the less reason to
+attribute this discovery to any accidental fire, as mines are formed
+nowhere but in dry and barren places, and such as are bare of trees
+and plants, so that it looks as if nature had taken pains to keep from
+us so mischievous a secret. Nothing therefore remains but the
+extraordinary circumstance of some volcano, which, belching forth
+metallic substances ready fused, might have given the spectators a
+notion of imitating that operation of nature; and after all we must
+suppose them endued with an extraordinary stock of courage and
+foresight to undertake so painful a work, and have, at so great a
+distance, an eye to the advantages they might derive from it;
+qualities scarcely suitable but to heads more exercised, than those of
+such discoverers can be supposed to have been.
+
+As to agriculture, the principles of it were known a long time before
+the practice of it took place, and it is hardly possible that men,
+constantly employed in drawing their subsistence from trees and
+plants, should not have early hit on the means employed by nature for
+the generation of vegetables; but in all probability it was very late
+before their industry took a turn that way, either because trees,
+which with their land and water game supplied them with sufficient
+food, did not require their attention; or because they did not know
+the use of corn; or because they had no instruments to cultivate it;
+or because they were destitute of foresight in regard to future
+necessities; or in fine, because they wanted means to hinder others
+from running away with the fruit of their labours. We may believe that
+on their becoming more industrious they began their agriculture by
+cultivating with sharp stones and pointed sticks a few pulse or roots
+about their cabins; and that it was a long time before they knew the
+method of preparing corn, and were provided with instruments necessary
+to raise it in large quantities; not to mention the necessity there
+is, in order to follow this occupation and sow lands, to consent to
+lose something at present to gain a great deal hereafter; a precaution
+very foreign to the turn of man's mind in a savage state, in which, as
+I have already taken notice, he can hardly foresee his wants from
+morning to night.
+
+For this reason the invention of other arts must have been necessary
+to oblige mankind to apply to that of agriculture. As soon as men
+were wanted to fuse and forge iron, others were wanted to maintain
+them. The more hands were employed in manufactures, the fewer hands
+were left to provide subsistence for all, though the number of mouths
+to be supplied with food continued the same; and as some required
+commodities in exchange for their iron, the rest at last found out the
+method of making iron subservient to the multiplication of
+commodities. Hence on the one hand husbandry and agriculture, and on
+the other the art of working metals and of multiplying the uses of
+them.
+
+To the tilling of the earth the distribution of it necessarily
+succeeded, and to property once acknowledged, the first rules of
+justice: for to secure every man his own, every man must have
+something. Moreover, as men began to extend their views to futurity,
+and all found themselves in possession of more or less goods capable
+of being lost, every one in particular had reason to fear, lest
+reprisals should be made on him for any injury he might do to others.
+This origin is so much the more natural, as it is impossible to
+conceive how property can flow from any other source but industry; for
+what can a man add but his labour to things which he has not made, in
+order to acquire a property in them? 'Tis the labour of the hands
+alone, which giving the husbandman a title to the produce of the land
+he has tilled gives him a title to the land itself, at least till he
+has gathered in the fruits of it, and so on from year to year; and
+this enjoyment forming a continued possession is easily transformed
+into a property. The ancients, says Grotius, by giving to Ceres the
+epithet of Legislatrix, and to a festival celebrated in her honour the
+name of Thesmorphoria, insinuated that the distribution of lands
+produced a new kind of right; that is, the right of property different
+from that which results from the law of nature.
+
+Things thus circumstanced might have remained equal, if men's talents
+had been equal, and if, for instance, the use of iron, and the
+consumption of commodities had always held an exact proportion to each
+other; but as this proportion had no support, it was soon broken. The
+man that had most strength performed most labour; the most dexterous
+turned his labour to best account; the most ingenious found out
+methods of lessening his labour; the husbandman required more iron, or
+the smith more corn, and while both worked equally, one earned a great
+deal by his labour, while the other could scarce live by his. It is
+thus that natural inequality insensibly unfolds itself with that
+arising from a variety of combinations, and that the difference among
+men, developed by the difference of their circumstances, becomes more
+sensible, more permanent in its effects, and begins to influence in
+the same proportion the condition of private persons.
+
+Things once arrived at this period, it is an easy matter to imagine
+the rest. I shall not stop to describe the successive inventions of
+other arts, the progress of language, the trial and employments of
+talents, the inequality of fortunes, the use or abuse of riches, nor
+all the details which follow these, and which every one may easily
+supply. I shall just give a glance at mankind placed in this new order
+of things.
+
+Behold then all our faculties developed; our memory and imagination at
+work, self-love interested; reason rendered active; and the mind
+almost arrived at the utmost bounds of that perfection it is capable
+of. Behold all our natural qualities put in motion; the rank and
+condition of every man established, not only as to the quantum of
+property and the power of serving or hurting others, but likewise as
+to genius, beauty, strength or address, merit or talents; and as these
+were the only qualities which could command respect, it was found
+necessary to have or at least to affect them. It was requisite for men
+to be thought what they really were not. To be and to appear became
+two very different things, and from this distinction sprang pomp and
+knavery, and all the vices which form their train. On the other hand,
+man, heretofore free and independent, was now in consequence of a
+multitude of new wants brought under subjection, as it were, to all
+nature, and especially to his fellows, whose slave in some sense he
+became even by becoming their master; if rich, he stood in need of
+their services, if poor, of their assistance; even mediocrity itself
+could not enable him to do without them. He must therefore have been
+continually at work to interest them in his happiness, and make them,
+if not really, at least apparently find their advantage in labouring
+for his: this rendered him sly and artful in his dealings with some,
+imperious and cruel in his dealings with others, and laid him under
+the necessity of using ill all those whom he stood in need of, as
+often as he could not awe them into a compliance with his will, and
+did not find it his interest to purchase it at the expense of real
+services. In fine, an insatiable ambition, the rage of raising their
+relative fortunes, not so much through real necessity, as to over-top
+others, inspire all men with a wicked inclination to injure each
+other, and with a secret jealousy so much the more dangerous, as to
+carry its point with the greater security, it often puts on the face
+of benevolence. In a word, sometimes nothing was to be seen but a
+contention of endeavours on the one hand, and an opposition of
+interests on the other, while a secret desire of thriving at the
+expense of others constantly prevailed. Such were the first effects of
+property, and the inseparable attendants of infant inequality.
+
+Riches, before the invention of signs to represent them, could scarce
+consist in anything but lands and cattle, the only real goods which
+men can possess. But when estates increased so much in number and in
+extent as to take in whole countries and touch each other, it became
+impossible for one man to aggrandise himself but at the expense of
+some other; and the supernumerary inhabitants, who were too weak or
+too indolent to make such acquisitions in their turn, impoverished
+without losing anything, because while everything about them changed
+they alone remained the same, were obliged to receive or force their
+subsistence from the hands of the rich. And hence began to flow,
+according to the different characters of each, domination and slavery,
+or violence and rapine. The rich on their side scarce began to taste
+the pleasure of commanding, when they preferred it to every other; and
+making use of their old slaves to acquire new ones, they no longer
+thought of anything but subduing and enslaving their neighbours; like
+those ravenous wolves, who having once tasted human flesh, despise
+every other food, and devour nothing but men for the future.
+
+It is thus that the most powerful or the most wretched, respectively
+considering their power and wretchedness as a kind of title to the
+substance of others, even equivalent to that of property, the equality
+once broken was followed by the most shocking disorders. It is thus
+that the usurpations of the rich, the pillagings of the poor, and the
+unbridled passions of all, by stifling the cries of natural
+compassion, and the as yet feeble voice of justice, rendered man
+avaricious, wicked and ambitious. There arose between the title of the
+strongest, and that of the first occupier a perpetual conflict, which
+always ended in battery and bloodshed. Infant society became a scene
+of the most horrible warfare: Mankind thus debased and harassed, and
+no longer able to retreat, or renounce the unhappy acquisitions it had
+made; labouring, in short merely to its confusion by the abuse of
+those faculties, which in themselves do it so much honour, brought
+itself to the very brink of ruin and destruction.
+
+  Attonitus novitate mali, divesque miserque,
+  Effugere optat opes; et quoe modo voverat, odit.
+
+But it is impossible that men should not sooner or later have made
+reflections on so wretched a situation, and upon the calamities with
+which they were overwhelmed. The rich in particular must have soon
+perceived how much they suffered by a perpetual war, of which they
+alone supported all the expense, and in which, though all risked life,
+they alone risked any substance. Besides, whatever colour they might
+pretend to give their usurpations, they sufficiently saw that these
+usurpations were in the main founded upon false and precarious titles,
+and that what they had acquired by mere force, others could again by
+mere force wrest out of their hands, without leaving them the least
+room to complain of such a proceeding. Even those, who owed all their
+riches to their own industry, could scarce ground their acquisitions
+upon a better title. It availed them nothing to say, 'Twas I built
+this wall; I acquired this spot by my labour. Who traced it out for
+you, another might object, and what right have you to expect payment
+at our expense for doing that we did not oblige you to do? Don't you
+know that numbers of your brethren perish, or suffer grievously for
+want of what you possess more than suffices nature, and that you
+should have had the express and unanimous consent of mankind to
+appropriate to yourself of their common, more than was requisite for
+your private subsistence? Destitute of solid reasons to justify, and
+sufficient force to defend himself; crushing individuals with ease,
+but with equal ease crushed by numbers; one against all, and unable,
+on account of mutual jealousies, to unite with his equals against
+banditti united by the common hopes of pillage; the rich man, thus
+pressed by necessity, at last conceived the deepest project that ever
+entered the human mind: this was to employ in his favour the very
+forces that attacked him, to make allies of his enemies, to inspire
+them with other maxims, and make them adopt other institutions as
+favourable to his pretensions, as the law of nature was unfavourable
+to them.
+
+With this view, after laying before his neighbours all the horrors of
+a situation, which armed them all one against another, which rendered
+their possessions as burdensome as their wants were intolerable, and
+in which no one could expect any safety either in poverty or riches,
+he easily invented specious arguments to bring them over to his
+purpose. "Let us unite," said he, "to secure the weak from
+oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure to every man the
+possession of what belongs to him: Let us form rules of justice and
+peace, to which all may be obliged to conform, which shall not except
+persons, but may in some sort make amends for the caprice of fortune,
+by submitting alike the powerful and the weak to the observance of
+mutual duties. In a word, instead of turning our forces against
+ourselves, let us collect them into a sovereign power, which may
+govern us by wise laws, may protect and defend all the members of the
+association, repel common enemies, and maintain a perpetual concord
+and harmony among us."
+
+Much fewer words of this kind were sufficient to draw in a parcel of
+rustics, whom it was an easy matter to impose upon, who had besides
+too many quarrels among themselves to live without arbiters, and too
+much avarice and ambition to live long without masters. All offered
+their necks to the yoke in hopes of securing their liberty; for though
+they had sense enough to perceive the advantages of a political
+constitution, they had not experience enough to see beforehand the
+dangers of it; those among them, who were best qualified to foresee
+abuses, were precisely those who expected to benefit by them; even the
+soberest judged it requisite to sacrifice one part of their liberty to
+ensure the other, as a man, dangerously wounded in any of his limbs,
+readily parts with it to save the rest of his body.
+
+Such was, or must have been, had man been left to himself, the origin
+of society and of the laws, which increased the fetters of the weak,
+and the strength of the rich; irretrievably destroyed natural liberty,
+fixed for ever the laws of property and inequality; changed an artful
+usurpation into an irrevocable title; and for the benefit of a few
+ambitious individuals subjected the rest of mankind to perpetual
+labour, servitude, and misery. We may easily conceive how the
+establishment of a single society rendered that of all the rest
+absolutely necessary, and how, to make head against united forces, it
+became necessary for the rest of mankind to unite in their turn.
+Societies once formed in this manner, soon multiplied or spread to
+such a degree, as to cover the face of the earth; and not to leave a
+corner in the whole universe, where a man could throw off the yoke,
+and withdraw his head from under the often ill-conducted sword which
+he saw perpetually hanging over it. The civil law being thus become
+the common rule of citizens, the law of nature no longer obtained but
+among the different societies, in which, under the name of the law of
+nations, it was qualified by some tacit conventions to render commerce
+possible, and supply the place of natural compassion, which, losing by
+degrees all that influence over societies which it originally had over
+individuals, no longer exists but in some great souls, who consider
+themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary
+barriers that separate people from people, after the example of the
+Sovereign Being from whom we all derive our existence, make the whole
+human race the object of their benevolence.
+
+Political bodies, thus remaining in a state of nature among
+themselves, soon experienced the inconveniences which had obliged
+individuals to quit it; and this state became much more fatal to these
+great bodies, than it had been before to the individuals which now
+composed them. Hence those national wars, those battles, those
+murders, those reprisals, which make nature shudder and shock reason;
+hence all those horrible prejudices, which make it a virtue and an
+honour to shed human blood. The worthiest men learned to consider the
+cutting the throats of their fellows as a duty; at length men began to
+butcher each other by thousands without knowing for what; and more
+murders were committed in a single action, and more horrible disorders
+at the taking of a single town, than had been committed in the state
+of nature during ages together upon the whole face of the earth. Such
+are the first effects we may conceive to have arisen from the division
+of mankind into different societies. Let us return to their
+institution.
+
+I know that several writers have assigned other origins of political
+society; as for instance, the conquests of the powerful, or the union
+of the weak; and it is no matter which of these causes we adopt in
+regard to what I am going to establish; that, however, which I have
+just laid down, seems to me the most natural, for the following
+reasons: First, because, in the first case, the right of conquest
+being in fact no right at all, it could not serve as a foundation for
+any other right, the conqueror and the conquered ever remaining with
+respect to each other in a state of war, unless the conquered,
+restored to the full possession of their liberty, should freely choose
+their conqueror for their chief. Till then, whatever capitulations
+might have been made between them, as these capitulations were founded
+upon violence, and of course _de facto_ null and void, there could not
+have existed in this hypothesis either a true society, or a political
+body, or any other law but that of the strongest. Second, because
+these words strong and weak, are ambiguous in the second case; for
+during the interval between the establishment of the right of property
+or prior occupation and that of political government, the meaning of
+these terms is better expressed by the words poor and rich, as before
+the establishment of laws men in reality had no other means of
+reducing their equals, but by invading the property of these equals,
+or by parting with some of their own property to them. Third, because
+the poor having nothing but their liberty to lose, it would have been
+the height of madness in them to give up willingly the only blessing
+they had left without obtaining some consideration for it: whereas the
+rich being sensible, if I may say so, in every part of their
+possessions, it was much easier to do them mischief, and therefore
+more incumbent upon them to guard against it; and because, in fine, it
+is but reasonable to suppose, that a thing has been invented by him to
+whom it could be of service rather than by him to whom it must prove
+detrimental.
+
+Government in its infancy had no regular and permanent form. For want
+of a sufficient fund of philosophy and experience, men could see no
+further than the present inconveniences, and never thought of
+providing remedies for future ones, but in proportion as they arose.
+In spite of all the labours of the wisest legislators, the political
+state still continued imperfect, because it was in a manner the work
+of chance; and, as the foundations of it were ill laid, time, though
+sufficient to discover its defects and suggest the remedies for them,
+could never mend its original vices. Men were continually repairing;
+whereas, to erect a good edifice, they should have begun as Lycurgus
+did at Sparta, by clearing the area, and removing the old materials.
+Society at first consisted merely of some general conventions which
+all the members bound themselves to observe, and for the performance
+of which the whole body became security to every individual.
+Experience was necessary to show the great weakness of such a
+constitution, and how easy it was for those, who infringed it, to
+escape the conviction or chastisement of faults, of which the public
+alone was to be both the witness and the judge; the laws could not
+fail of being eluded a thousand ways; inconveniences and disorders
+could not but multiply continually, till it was at last found
+necessary to think of committing to private persons the dangerous
+trust of public authority, and to magistrates the care of enforcing
+obedience to the people: for to say that chiefs were elected before
+confederacies were formed, and that the ministers of the laws existed
+before the laws themselves, is a supposition too ridiculous to deserve
+I should seriously refute it.
+
+It would be equally unreasonable to imagine that men at first threw
+themselves into the arms of an absolute master, without any conditions
+or consideration on his side; and that the first means contrived by
+jealous and unconquered men for their common safety was to run hand
+over head into slavery. In fact, why did they give themselves
+superiors, if it was not to be defended by them against oppression,
+and protected in their lives, liberties, and properties, which are in
+a manner the constitutional elements of their being? Now in the
+relations between man and man, the worst that can happen to one man
+being to see himself at the discretion of another, would it not have
+been contrary to the dictates of good sense to begin by making over to
+a chief the only things for the preservation of which they stood in
+need of his assistance? What equivalent could he have offered them
+for so fine a privilege? And had he presumed to exact it on pretense
+of defending them, would he not have immediately received the answer
+in the apologue? What worse treatment can we expect from an enemy? It
+is therefore past dispute, and indeed a fundamental maxim of political
+law, that people gave themselves chiefs to defend their liberty and
+not be enslaved by them. If we have a prince, said Pliny to Trajan, it
+is in order that he may keep us from having a master.
+
+Political writers argue in regard to the love of liberty with the same
+philosophy that philosophers do in regard to the state of nature; by
+the things they see they judge of things very different which they
+have never seen, and they attribute to men a natural inclination to
+slavery, on account of the patience with which the slaves within their
+notice carry the yoke; not reflecting that it is with liberty as with
+innocence and virtue, the value of which is not known but by those who
+possess them, though the relish for them is lost with the things
+themselves. I know the charms of your country, said Brasidas to a
+satrap who was comparing the life of the Spartans with that of the
+Persepolites; but you can not know the pleasures of mine.
+
+As an unbroken courser erects his mane, paws the ground, and rages at
+the bare sight of the bit, while a trained horse patiently suffers
+both whip and spur, just so the barbarian will never reach his neck to
+the yoke which civilized man carries without murmuring but prefers the
+most stormy liberty to a calm subjection. It is not therefore by the
+servile disposition of enslaved nations that we must judge of the
+natural dispositions of man for or against slavery, but by the
+prodigies done by every free people to secure themselves from
+oppression. I know that the first are constantly crying up that peace
+and tranquillity they enjoy in their irons, and that _miserrimam
+servitutem pacem appellant_: but when I see the others sacrifice
+pleasures, peace, riches, power, and even life itself to the
+preservation of that single jewel so much slighted by those who have
+lost it; when I see free-born animals through a natural abhorrence of
+captivity dash their brains out against the bars of their prison; when
+I see multitudes of naked savages despise European pleasures, and
+brave hunger, fire and sword, and death itself to preserve their
+independency; I feel that it belongs not to slaves to argue concerning
+liberty.
+
+As to paternal authority, from which several have derived absolute
+government and every other mode of society, it is sufficient, without
+having recourse to Locke and Sidney, to observe that nothing in the
+world differs more from the cruel spirit of despotism that the
+gentleness of that authority, which looks more to the advantage of him
+who obeys than to the utility of him who commands; that by the law of
+nature the father continues master of his child no longer than the
+child stands in need of his assistance; that after that term they
+become equal, and that then the son, entirely independent of the
+father, owes him no obedience, but only respect. Gratitude is indeed
+a duty which we are bound to pay, but which benefactors can not exact.
+Instead of saying that civil society is derived from paternal
+authority, we should rather say that it is to the former that the
+latter owes its principal force: No one individual was acknowledged as
+the father of several other individuals, till they settled about him.
+The father's goods, which he can indeed dispose of as he pleases, are
+the ties which hold his children to their dependence upon him, and he
+may divide his substance among them in proportion as they shall have
+deserved his attention by a continual deference to his commands. Now
+the subjects of a despotic chief, far from having any such favour to
+expect from him, as both themselves and all they have are his
+property, or at least are considered by him as such, are obliged to
+receive as a favour what he relinquishes to them of their own
+property. He does them justice when he strips them; he treats them
+with mercy when he suffers them to live. By continuing in this manner
+to compare facts with right, we should discover as little solidity as
+truth in the voluntary establishment of tyranny; and it would be a
+hard matter to prove the validity of a contract which was binding only
+on one side, in which one of the parties should stake everything and
+the other nothing, and which could turn out to the prejudice of him
+alone who had bound himself.
+
+This odious system is even, at this day, far from being that of wise
+and good monarchs, and especially of the kings of France, as may be
+seen by divers passages in their edicts, and particularly by that of a
+celebrated piece 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 realm, since, that he is, is a maxim of the
+law of nations which flattery has sometimes attacked, but which good
+princes have always defended as the tutelary divinity of their realms.
+How much more reasonable is it to say with the sage Plato, that the
+perfect happiness of a state consists in the subjects obeying their
+prince, the prince obeying the laws, and the laws being equitable and
+always directed to the good of the public?" I shall not stop to
+consider, if, liberty being the most noble faculty of man, it is not
+degrading one's nature, reducing one's self to the level of brutes,
+who are the slaves of instinct, and even offending the author of one's
+being, to renounce without reserve the most precious of his gifts, and
+submit to the commission of all the crimes he has forbid us, merely to
+gratify a mad or a cruel master; and if this sublime artist ought to
+be more irritated at seeing his work destroyed than at seeing it
+dishonoured. I shall only ask what right those, who were not afraid
+thus to degrade themselves, could have to subject their dependants to
+the same ignominy, and renounce, in the name of their posterity,
+blessings for which it is not indebted to their liberality, and
+without which life itself must appear a burthen to all those who are
+worthy to live.
+
+Puffendorf says that, as we can transfer our property from one to
+another by contracts and conventions, we may likewise divest ourselves
+of our liberty in favour of other men. This, in my opinion, is a very
+poor way of arguing; for, in the first place, the property I cede to
+another becomes by such cession a thing quite foreign to me, and the
+abuse of which can no way affect me; but it concerns me greatly that
+my liberty is not abused, and I can not, without incurring the guilt
+of the crimes I may be forced to commit, expose myself to become the
+instrument of any. Besides, the right of property being of mere human
+convention and institution, every man may dispose as he pleases of
+what he possesses: But the case is otherwise with regard to the
+essential gifts of nature, such as life and liberty, which every man
+is permitted to enjoy, and of which it is doubtful at least whether
+any man has a right to divest himself: By giving up the one, we
+degrade our being; by giving up the other we annihilate it as much as
+it is our power to do so; and as no temporal enjoyments can indemnify
+us for the loss of either, it would be at once offending both nature
+and reason to renounce them for any consideration. But though we could
+transfer our liberty as we do our substance, the difference would be
+very great with regard to our children, who enjoy our substance but by
+a cession of our right; whereas liberty being a blessing, which as men
+they hold from nature, their parents have no right to strip them of
+it; so that as to establish slavery it was necessary to do violence to
+nature, so it was necessary to alter nature to perpetuate such a
+right; and the jurisconsults, who have gravely pronounced that the
+child of a slave comes a slave into the world, have in other words
+decided, that a man does not come a man into the world.
+
+It therefore appears to me incontestably true, that not only
+governments did not begin by arbitrary power, which is but the
+corruption and extreme term of government, and at length brings it
+back to the law of the strongest, against which governments were at
+first the remedy, but even that, allowing they had commenced in this
+manner, such power being illegal in itself could never have served as
+a foundation to the rights of society, nor of course to the inequality
+of institution.
+
+I shall not now enter upon the inquiries which still remain to be made
+into the nature of the fundamental pacts of every kind of government,
+but, following the common opinion, confine myself in this place to the
+establishment of the political body as a real contract between the
+multitude and the chiefs elected by it. A contract by which both
+parties oblige themselves to the observance of the laws that are
+therein stipulated, and form the bands of their union. The multitude
+having, on occasion of the social relations between them, concentered
+all their wills in one person, all the articles, in regard to which
+this will explains itself, become so many fundamental laws, which
+oblige without exception all the members of the state, and one of
+which laws regulates the choice and the power of the magistrates
+appointed to look to the execution of the rest. This power extends to
+everything that can maintain the constitution, but extends to nothing
+that can alter it. To this power are added honours, that may render
+the laws and the ministers of them respectable; and the persons of the
+ministers are distinguished by certain prerogatives, which may make
+them amends for the great fatigues inseparable from a good
+administration. The magistrate, on his side, obliges himself not to
+use the power with which he is intrusted but conformably to the
+intention of his constituents, to maintain every one of them in the
+peaceable possession of his property, and upon all occasions prefer
+the good of the public to his own private interest.
+
+Before experience had demonstrated, or a thorough knowledge of the
+human heart had pointed out, the abuses inseparable from such a
+constitution, it must have appeared so much the more perfect, as those
+appointed to look to its preservation were themselves most concerned
+therein; for magistracy and its rights being built solely on the
+fundamental laws, as soon as these ceased to exist, the magistrates
+would cease to be lawful, the people would no longer be bound to obey
+them, and, as the essence of the state did not consist in the
+magistrates but in the laws, the members of it would immediately
+become entitled to their primitive and natural liberty.
+
+A little reflection would afford us new arguments in confirmation of
+this truth, and the nature of the contract might alone convince us
+that it can not be irrevocable: for if there was no superior power
+capable of guaranteeing the fidelity of the contracting parties and of
+obliging them to fulfil their mutual engagements, they would remain
+sole judges in their own cause, and each of them would always have a
+right to renounce the contract, as soon as he discovered that the
+other had broke the conditions of it, or that these conditions ceased
+to suit his private convenience. Upon this principle, the right of
+abdication may probably be founded. Now, to consider as we do nothing
+but what is human in this institution, if the magistrate, who has all
+the power in his own hands, and who appropriates to himself all the
+advantages of the contract, has notwithstanding a right to divest
+himself of his authority; how much a better right must the people, who
+pay for all the faults of its chief, have to renounce their dependence
+upon him. But the shocking dissensions and disorders without number,
+which would be the necessary consequence of so dangerous a privilege,
+show more than anything else how much human governments stood in need
+of a more solid basis than that of mere reason, and how necessary it
+was for the public tranquillity, that the will of the Almighty should
+interpose to give to sovereign authority, a sacred and inviolable
+character, which should deprive subjects of the mischievous right to
+dispose of it to whom they pleased. If mankind had received no other
+advantages from religion, this alone would be sufficient to make them
+adopt and cherish it, since it is the means of saving more blood than
+fanaticism has been the cause of spilling. But to resume the thread of
+our hypothesis.
+
+The various forms of government owe their origin to the various
+degrees of inequality between the members, at the time they first
+coalesced into a political body. Where a man happened to be eminent
+for power, for virtue, for riches, or for credit, he became sole
+magistrate, and the state assumed a monarchical form; if many of
+pretty equal eminence out-topped all the rest, they were jointly
+elected, and this election produced an aristocracy; those, between
+whose fortune or talents there happened to be no such disproportion,
+and who had deviated less from the state of nature, retained in common
+the supreme administration, and formed a democracy. Time demonstrated
+which of these forms suited mankind best. Some remained altogether
+subject to the laws; others soon bowed their necks to masters. The
+former laboured to preserve their liberty; the latter thought of
+nothing but invading that of their neighbours, jealous at seeing
+others enjoy a blessing which themselves had lost. In a word, riches
+and conquest fell to the share of the one, and virtue and happiness to
+that of the other.
+
+In these various modes of government the offices at first were all
+elective; and when riches did not preponderate, the preference was
+given to merit, which gives a natural ascendant, and to age, which is
+the parent of deliberateness in council, and experience in execution.
+The ancients among the Hebrews, the Geronts of Sparta, the Senate of
+Rome, nay, the very etymology of our word seigneur, show how much gray
+hairs were formerly respected. The oftener the choice fell upon old
+men, the oftener it became necessary to repeat it, and the more the
+trouble of such repetitions became sensible; electioneering took
+place; factions arose; the parties contracted ill blood; civil wars
+blazed forth; the lives of the citizens were sacrificed to the
+pretended happiness of the state; and things at last came to such a
+pass, as to be ready to relapse into their primitive confusion. The
+ambition of the principal men induced them to take advantage of these
+circumstances to perpetuate the hitherto temporary charges in their
+families; the people already inured to dependence, accustomed to ease
+and the conveniences of life, and too much enervated to break their
+fetters, consented to the increase of their slavery for the sake of
+securing their tranquillity; and it is thus that chiefs, become
+hereditary, contracted the habit of considering magistracies as a
+family estate, and themselves as proprietors of those communities, of
+which at first they were but mere officers; to call their
+fellow-citizens their slaves; to look upon them, like so many cows or
+sheep, as a part of their substance; and to style themselves the peers
+of Gods, and Kings of Kings.
+
+By pursuing the progress of inequality in these different revolutions,
+we shall discover that the establishment of laws and of the right of
+property was the first term of it; the institution of magistrates the
+second; and the third and last the changing of legal into arbitrary
+power; so that the different states of rich and poor were authorized
+by the first epoch; those of powerful and weak by the second; and by
+the third those of master and slave, which formed the last degree of
+inequality, and the term in which all the rest at last end, till new
+revolutions entirely dissolve the government, or bring it back nearer
+to its legal constitution.
+
+To conceive the necessity of this progress, we are not so much to
+consider the motives for the establishment of political bodies, as the
+forms these bodies assume in their administration; and the
+inconveniences with which they are essentially attended; for those
+vices, which render social institutions necessary, are the same which
+render the abuse of such institutions unavoidable; and as (Sparta
+alone excepted, whose laws chiefly regarded the education of children,
+and where Lycurgus established such manners and customs, as in a great
+measure made laws needless,) the laws, in general less strong than the
+passions, restrain men without changing them; it would be no hard
+matter to prove that every government, which carefully guarding
+against all alteration and corruption should scrupulously comply with
+the ends of its institution, was unnecessarily instituted; and that a
+country, where no one either eluded the laws, or made an ill use of
+magistracy, required neither laws nor magistrates.
+
+Political distinctions are necessarily attended with civil
+distinctions. The inequality between the people and the chiefs
+increase so fast as to be soon felt by the private members, and
+appears among them in a thousand shapes according to their passions,
+their talents, and the circumstances of affairs. The magistrate can
+not usurp any illegal power without making himself creatures, with
+whom he must divide it. Besides, the citizens of a free state suffer
+themselves to be oppressed merely in proportion as, hurried on by a
+blind ambition, and looking rather below than above them, they come to
+love authority more than independence. When they submit to fetters,
+'tis only to be the better able to fetter others in their turn. It is
+no easy matter to make him obey, who does not wish to command; and the
+most refined policy would find it impossible to subdue those men, who
+only desire to be independent; but inequality easily gains ground
+among base and ambitious souls, ever ready to run the risks of
+fortune, and almost indifferent whether they command or obey, as she
+proves either favourable or adverse to them. Thus then there must have
+been a time, when the eyes of the people were bewitched to such a
+degree, that their rulers needed only to have said to the most pitiful
+wretch, "Be great you and all your posterity," to make him immediately
+appear great in the eyes of every one as well as in his own; and his
+descendants took still more upon them, in proportion to their removes
+from him: the more distant and uncertain the cause, the greater the
+effect; the longer line of drones a family produced, the more
+illustrious it was reckoned.
+
+Were this a proper place to enter into details, I could easily explain
+in what manner inequalities in point of credit and authority become
+unavoidable among private persons the moment that, united into one
+body, they are obliged to compare themselves one with another, and to
+note the differences which they find in the continual use every man
+must make of his neighbour. These differences are of several kinds;
+but riches, nobility or rank, power and personal merit, being in
+general the principal distinctions, by which men in society measure
+each other, I could prove that the harmony or conflict between these
+different forces is the surest indication of the good or bad original
+constitution of any state: I could make it appear that, as among these
+four kinds of inequality, personal qualities are the source of all the
+rest, riches is that in which they ultimately terminate, because,
+being the most immediately useful to the prosperity of individuals,
+and the most easy to communicate, they are made use of to purchase
+every other distinction. By this observation we are enabled to judge
+with tolerable exactness, how much any people has deviated from its
+primitive institution, and what steps it has still to make to the
+extreme term of corruption. I could show how much this universal
+desire of reputation, of honours, of preference, with which we are all
+devoured, exercises and compares our talents and our forces: how much
+it excites and multiplies our passions; and, by creating an universal
+competition, rivalship, or rather enmity among men, how many
+disappointments, successes, and catastrophes of every kind it daily
+causes among the innumerable pretenders whom it engages in the same
+career. I could show that it is to this itch of being spoken of, to
+this fury of distinguishing ourselves which seldom or never gives us a
+moment's respite, that we owe both the best and the worst things among
+us, our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our errors, our
+conquerors and our philosophers; that is to say, a great many bad
+things to a very few good ones. I could prove, in short, that if we
+behold a handful of rich and powerful men seated on the pinnacle of
+fortune and greatness, while the crowd grovel in obscurity and want,
+it is merely because the first prize what they enjoy but in the same
+degree that others want it, and that, without changing their
+condition, they would cease to be happy the minute the people ceased
+to be miserable.
+
+But these details would alone furnish sufficient matter for a more
+considerable work, in which might be weighed the advantages and
+disadvantages of every species of government, relatively to the rights
+of man in a state of nature, and might likewise be unveiled all the
+different faces under which inequality has appeared to this day, and
+may hereafter appear to the end of time, according to the nature of
+these several governments, and the revolutions time must unavoidably
+occasion in them. We should then see the multitude oppressed by
+domestic tyrants in consequence of those very precautions taken by
+them to guard against foreign masters. We should see oppression
+increase continually without its being ever possible for the oppressed
+to know where it would stop, nor what lawful means they had left to
+check its progress. We should see the rights of citizens, and the
+liberties of nations extinguished by slow degrees, and the groans, and
+protestations and appeals of the weak treated as seditious murmurings.
+We should see policy confine to a mercenary portion of the people the
+honour of defending the common cause. We should see imposts made
+necessary by such measures, the disheartened husbandman desert his
+field even in time of peace, and quit the plough to take up the sword.
+We should see fatal and whimsical rules laid down concerning the point
+of honour. We should see the champions of their country sooner or
+later become her enemies, and perpetually holding their poniards to
+the breasts of their fellow citizens. Nay, the time would come when
+they might be heard to say to the oppressor of their country:
+
+  Pectore si fratris gladium juguloque parentis
+  Condere me jubeas, gravidoeque in viscera partu
+  Conjugis, in vita peragam tamen omnia dextra.
+
+From the vast inequality of conditions and fortunes, from the great
+variety of passions and of talents, of useless arts, of pernicious
+arts, of frivolous sciences, would issue clouds of prejudices equally
+contrary to reason, to happiness, to virtue. We should see the chiefs
+foment everything that tends to weaken men formed into societies by
+dividing them; everything that, while it gives society an air of
+apparent harmony, sows in it the seeds of real division; everything
+that can inspire the different orders with mutual distrust and hatred
+by an opposition of their rights and interest, and of course
+strengthen that power which contains them all.
+
+'Tis from the bosom of this disorder and these revolutions, that
+despotism gradually rearing up her hideous crest, and devouring in
+every part of the state all that still remained sound and untainted,
+would at last issue to trample upon the laws and the people, and
+establish herself upon the ruins of the republic. The times
+immediately preceding this last alteration would be times of calamity
+and trouble: but at last everything would be swallowed up by the
+monster; and the people would no longer have chiefs or laws, but only
+tyrants. At this fatal period all regard to virtue and manners would
+likewise disappear; for despotism, _cui ex honesto nulla est spes_,
+tolerates no other master, wherever it reigns; the moment it speaks,
+probity and duty lose all their influence, and the blindest obedience
+is the only virtue the miserable slaves have left them to practise.
+
+This is the last term of inequality, the extreme point which closes
+the circle and meets that from which we set out. 'Tis here that all
+private men return to their primitive equality, because they are no
+longer of any account; and that, the subjects having no longer any law
+but that of their master, nor the master any other law but his
+passions, all notions of good and principles of justice again
+disappear. 'Tis here that everything returns to the sole law of the
+strongest, and of course to a new state of nature different from that
+with which we began, in as much as the first was the state of nature
+in its purity, and the last the consequence of excessive corruption.
+There is, in other respects, so little difference between these two
+states, and the contract of government is so much dissolved by
+despotism, that the despot is no longer master than he continues the
+strongest, and that, as soon as his slaves can expel him, they may do
+it without his having the least right to complain of their using him
+ill. The insurrection, which ends in the death or despotism of a
+sultan, is as juridical an act as any by which the day before he
+disposed of the lives and fortunes of his subjects. Force alone upheld
+him, force alone overturns him. Thus all things take place and succeed
+in their natural order; and whatever may be the upshot of these hasty
+and frequent revolutions, no one man has reason to complain of
+another's injustice, but only of his own indiscretion or bad fortune.
+
+By thus discovering and following the lost and forgotten tracks, by
+which man from the natural must have arrived at the civil state; by
+restoring, with the intermediate positions which I have been just
+indicating, those which want of leisure obliges me to suppress, or
+which my imagination has not suggested, every attentive reader must
+unavoidably be struck at the immense space which separates these two
+states. 'Tis in this slow succession of things he may meet with the
+solution of an infinite number of problems in morality and politics,
+which philosophers are puzzled to solve. He will perceive that, the
+mankind of one age not being the mankind of another, the reason why
+Diogenes could not find a man was, that he sought among his
+cotemporaries the man of an earlier period: Cato, he will then see,
+fell with Rome and with liberty, because he did not suit the age in
+which he lived; and the greatest of men served only to astonish that
+world, which would have cheerfully obeyed him, had he come into it
+five hundred years earlier. In a word, he will find himself in a
+condition to understand how the soul and the passions of men by
+insensible alterations change as it were their nature; how it comes to
+pass, that at the long run our wants and our pleasures change objects;
+that, original man vanishing by degrees, society no longer offers to
+our inspection but an assemblage of artificial men and factitious
+passions, which are the work of all these new relations, and have no
+foundation in nature. Reflection teaches us nothing on that head, but
+what experience perfectly confirms. Savage man and civilised man
+differ so much at bottom in point of inclinations and passions, that
+what constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would reduce the
+other to despair. The first sighs for nothing but repose and liberty;
+he desires only to live, and to be exempt from labour; nay, the
+ataraxy of the most confirmed Stoic falls short of his consummate
+indifference for every other object. On the contrary, the citizen
+always in motion, is perpetually sweating and toiling, and racking his
+brains to find out occupations still more laborious: He continues a
+drudge to his last minute; nay, he courts death to be able to live, or
+renounces life to acquire immortality. He cringes to men in power whom
+he hates, and to rich men whom he despises; he sticks at nothing to
+have the honour of serving them; he is not ashamed to value himself on
+his own weakness and the protection they afford him; and proud of his
+chains, he speaks with disdain of those who have not the honour of
+being the partner of his bondage. What a spectacle must the painful
+and envied labours of an European minister of state form in the eyes
+of a Caribbean! How many cruel deaths would not this indolent savage
+prefer to such a horrid life, which very often is not even sweetened
+by the pleasure of doing good? But to see the drift of so many cares,
+his mind should first have affixed some meaning to these words power
+and reputation; he should be apprised that there are men who consider
+as something the looks of the rest of mankind, who know how to be
+happy and satisfied with themselves on the testimony of others sooner
+than upon their own. In fact, the real source of all those
+differences, is that the savage lives within himself, whereas the
+citizen, constantly beside himself, knows only how to live in the
+opinion of others; insomuch that it is, if I may say so, merely from
+their judgment that he derives the consciousness of his own existence.
+It is foreign to my subject to show how this disposition engenders so
+much indifference for good and evil, notwithstanding so many and such
+fine discourses of morality; how everything, being reduced to
+appearances, becomes mere art and mummery; honour, friendship, virtue,
+and often vice itself, which we at last learn the secret to boast of;
+how, in short, ever inquiring of others what we are, and never daring
+to question ourselves on so delicate a point, in the midst of so much
+philosophy, humanity, and politeness, and so many sublime maxims, we
+have nothing to show for ourselves but a deceitful and frivolous
+exterior, honour without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure
+without happiness. It is sufficient that I have proved that this is
+not the original condition of man, and that it is merely the spirit of
+society, and the inequality which society engenders, that thus change
+and transform all our natural inclinations.
+
+I have endeavoured to exhibit the origin and progress of inequality,
+the institution and abuse of political societies, as far as these
+things are capable of being deduced from the nature of man by the mere
+light of reason, and independently of those sacred maxims which give
+to the sovereign authority the sanction of divine right. It follows
+from this picture, that as there is scarce any inequality among men in
+a state of nature, all that which we now behold owes its force and its
+growth to the development of our faculties and the improvement of our
+understanding, and at last becomes permanent and lawful by the
+establishment of property and of laws. It likewise follows that moral
+inequality, authorised by any right that is merely positive, clashes
+with natural right, as often as it does not combine in the same
+proportion with physical inequality: a distinction which sufficiently
+determines, what we are able to think in that respect of that kind of
+inequality which obtains in all civilised nations, since it is
+evidently against the law of nature that infancy should command old
+age, folly conduct wisdom, and a handful of men should be ready to
+choke with superfluities, while the famished multitude want the
+commonest necessaries of life.
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's Note: Some words which appear to be potential typos are
+printed as such in the original book: These possible words include
+cotemporaries and oftens. The paragraph starting with the words "This
+odius system is even" contains unmatched quotes, which have been
+reproduced as they appeared in the orginal. This work was transcribed
+from a anthology (Harvard Classics Volume 34) published in 1910. The
+editor of the entire series was Charles W. Eliot. The name of the
+translator was not given, nor was the name of the author of the
+introduction. Indented lines indicate embedded verse that should not
+be re-wrapped.]
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Discourse Upon The Origin And The
+Foundation Of The Inequality Among Mankind, by Jean Jacques Rousseau
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 11136 ***