Julie or the new heloise english pdf

CONTENTS

COVER ABOUT THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR ALSO BY JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU TITLE PAGE INTRODUCTION by Leo Damrosch

DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN [COMPLETE]

ON THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, OR, PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL RIGHT [COMPLETE] ÉMILE, OR, ON EDUCATION JULIE, OR, THE NEW HÉLOÏSE CONFESSIONS REVERIES OF THE SOLITARY WALKER

TIMELINE BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE NOTES FURTHER READING ACKNOWLEDGMENTS THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE COPYRIGHT

About the Author

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712. He was a writer and political theorist of the Enlightenment. In 1750 he published his first important work A Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) where he argued that man had become corrupted by society and civilisation. In 1755, he published Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and in The Social Contract (1762) he argued, ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains’. This political treatise earned him exile from his home city of Geneva and arguably inspired the French Revolution (his ashes were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris in 1794). He also wrote Èmile, a treatise on education and The New Eloise (1761). This novel scandalised the French authorities who ordered Rousseau’s arrest. In his last 10 years, Rousseau wrote his Confessions. In Confessions he remembers his adventurous life, his achievements and the persecution he suffered from opponents. His revelations inspired the likes of Proust, Goethe and Tolstoy among others. Rousseau died on 2 July in France in 1778.

Peter Constantine’s honours include the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, and Greece’s Translators of Literature Prize. He translated Machiavelli’s The Prince for Vintage Classics.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

PETER CONSTANTINE, winner of the PEN Translation Prize and a National Translation Award, has earned wide acclaim for his translations of The Undiscovered Chekhov and of the complete works of Isaac Babel, as well as for his Modern Library translations, which include Gogol’s Taras Bulba, Voltaire’s Candide, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and Tolstoy’s The Cossacks.

ALSO BY JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Discourse on the Arts and Sciences

Narcissus

Discourse on Political Economy

Pygmalion

Confessions

Constitutional Project for Corsica

Considerations on the Government of Poland

Essay on the Origin of Languages

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU

The Essential Writings of Jean- Jacques Rousseau

TRANSLATED BY

Peter Constantine

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Leo Damrosch

INTRODUCTION

Leo Damrosch

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the most original thinker in the great movement known as the Enlightenment, although he was probably not the best at any single thing, nor did he aspire to be. Unlike Voltaire or Hume or Diderot, Rousseau had never been a brilliant student; in fact he was never a student at all. Entirely self-taught, he freely acknowledged the handicaps that that entailed. But as an outsider who saw eighteenth-century culture from a uniquely independent perspective, he penetrated to depths that nobody else did. Instead of proposing gradual reforms in society, which was the normal program of the Enlightenment, he mounted a profound critique of its unexamined assumptions. In the sense in which the word philosophe means an imaginative intellectual rather than a formal philosopher, Rousseau has a claim to be considered the greatest of them all.

Indeed, Rousseau was so far ahead of his time that reviewers dismissed his books as merely paradoxical. “He can’t really believe that” was a frequent reaction. But he said, “I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices,”1 and as his challenge sank in, his influence grew. The distinguished Rousseauian Jean Starobinski says of the groundbreaking Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, “The immense echo of these words expanded in time and space far beyond what Rousseau could have foreseen.”2

Rousseau was born in the militantly Protestant city of Geneva in 1712, the son of an affectionate but temperamental watchmaker named Isaac Rousseau. Shortly after giving birth to him his mother died of an infection, and it has been suggested that he bore a lifelong burden of guilt as a result. In later life he idealized the compact city-state—Geneva was then an independent republic, not yet part of Switzerland—and believed that it inspired his belief in the emotional loyalty that citizens need to feel to their community. Praising Genevan mores in a polemical work, he recalled a scene when a citizen

militia had finished drilling in the square below the apartment where he and his father lived:

Most of them gathered after the meal in the Place Saint-Gervais and began dancing all together, officers and soldiers, around the fountain, on to which drummers, fifers, and torch- carriers had climbed. … The women couldn’t remain at their windows for long, and they came down. Wives came to see their husbands, servants brought wine, and even the children, awakened by the noise, ran around half-dressed among their fathers and mothers. The dance was suspended, and there was only embracing, laughter, toasts, caresses. … My father, hugging me, was overcome by trembling in a way that I can still feel and share. “Jean- Jacques,” he said to me, “love your country! Do you see these good Genevans? They are all friends, they are all brothers, joy and concord reign in their midst.”3 [Translations in the introduction are by Leo Damrosch.]

But between the lines in the autobiographical Confessions one senses a lonely and discouraging childhood, which concluded in an apprenticeship from which Rousseau impulsively ran away at the age of sixteen.

Mainly as a way of getting financial support, he converted to Catholicism. After a year in Turin, during which he was reduced to working as a humble lackey, he went to Annecy in the Savoy (not yet part of France) and became the protégé of a beautiful young Catholic convert named Mme de Warens. Under her influence, and that of kindly priests and monks in her social circle, he began to read seriously and to develop a lifelong passion for music. He still had no plans, however, and it began to look as if he would always be a drifter. When his patroness seduced him he was seriously alarmed, since he regarded her as virtually his mother, while for her part she soon tired of responsibility for an apparently shiftless young man.

In due course Rousseau moved to Lyon, where he took a job as tutor to two small boys, and then to Paris. There he became close to Denis Diderot, a brilliant polymath his own age, who did much to expand his thinking. Meanwhile he acquired a partner for life, a young servant girl named Thérèse Levasseur. Their relationship was in effect a common-law marriage, but never a legal one, and when Thérèse bore five children, Rousseau insisted on consigning them to a home for foundlings. Years later his reputation would be seriously damaged when Voltaire, who hated him, made this conduct public.

In 1749, when Rousseau was thirty-seven, he set out on foot to visit Diderot, who had been incarcerated in the château of Vincennes near Paris because of irreligious hints he had published. (To assure ongoing publication

of the great Encyclopédie, of which he was co-editor, Diderot promised never to transgress again and was released.) Pausing to rest, Rousseau idly opened a newspaper and found his life permanently changed. The obscure Academy of Dijon was offering a prize for the best essay on the topic “Whether the restoration of the sciences and arts has contributed to purify morals.” It was a trite question, practically taking for granted an affirmative answer, but when Rousseau suddenly saw a new way of arguing the negative, “I beheld a different universe and became a different man.” He was overcome by “dizziness like that of drunkenness,” his heart pounded, and tears drenched his shirt. Under a tree, he scribbled a speech by an ancient Roman who returns from the past to denounce modern sophistication, crying, “Madmen, what have you done?” Rousseau won the prize, his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts was published, and it was an immediate sensation.

The more searching Discourse on the Origin of Inequality followed in 1755, and in 1761–62, in the space of eighteen months, Rousseau produced no fewer than three great books. Julie, or, The New Héloïse, a novel about romantic passion transformed into friendship, became an international bestseller. Émile, or, On Education, urging that children should be allowed to develop their individual talents, has influenced educational reforms ever since. And the Social Contract, insisting that a government gains legitimacy only from the shared commitment of its citizens, would have explosive effect a generation later.

Rousseau was now a celebrated writer in a remarkable range of fields, and in fact his work was far from miscellaneous, since—as he said himself—it all flowed from a single foundational idea. Man, he held, is naturally good, and it is society that has made him wicked. In those days, whatever was wrong in the world was conventionally ascribed by preachers to the sin of pride, and by political theorists to insubordination against superiors. Rousseau held that in the state of nature, “natural man” would have been self-sufficient and uncompetitive, and although civilization has brought benefits that we can no longer bear to give up, we should strive to recover as much of our natural selves as we can. In romantic relationships, we should break free from possessive passion; in education, we should encourage individuality to blossom; and in politics, we should respect the freedom of the individual.

The heart of Rousseau’s thinking, his fundamental paradox, was to honor individualism but at the same time to submit it to a devastating critique.

Progressive writers in the Enlightenment thought that the good of society was served by competition among individuals, who find it in their own interest to cooperate as well as compete; Adam Smith extolled the virtues of sociability even as he called for a free market. Rousseau took a more pessimistic view of self-interest, like that of seventeenth-century moralists such as Pascal, who said grimly in his Pensées, “Each me is the enemy of all the others, and would like to be their tyrant.”4 But whereas Pascal ascribed selfishness to original sin, Rousseau ascribed it to society, and he imagined a new kind of society in which “every individual, in uniting with everyone else, will still only be answerable to himself and remain as free as before.”5

From social criticism, Rousseau’s thinking naturally moved to individual psychology. In his own life he had experienced the ways in which a trusting, affectionate child could become selfish and dishonest, and he now preached an ideal of “sincerity” in which inside and outside would be in harmony, as he believed they once were for natural man. Eventually he had to acknowledge that it was harder to be sincere than he first thought, but this, too, produced a striking insight: we are conditioned so effectively to play artificial roles that we mistake them for our true nature. Rousseau saw that when he had been acting as a righteous counterculture critic, truth telling had actually been a kind of playacting:

I was no longer that timid person, more shamefaced than modest, who didn’t dare to introduce himself or speak, whom a playful word would disconcert and a woman’s glance would cause to blush. … The contempt that my profound meditations inspired for the mores, maxims, and prejudices of the age made me impervious to the mockery of those who entertained them, and I crushed their little bon mots with my pronouncements as I would have crushed an insect between my fingers.6

Most of the philosophes took it for granted that we are by nature role- players and in fact are defined by our roles. Rousseau, inner-directed rather than other-directed, sought what would later be known as authenticity: commitment to a true self that lies deeper than any role. In a riposte to Diderot’s treatise The Paradox of the Actor, he described the skill of accomplished performers as simply a specialized version of what everyone is conditioned to do. In an eloquent critique that has much in common with the Calvinist values of his native Geneva, and also with Plato’s rejection of the arts in The Republic, he rose to moral outrage:

What is the talent of the actor? The art of counterfeiting himself, clothing himself with another character than his own, appearing different than he is, becoming passionate in cold blood, saying something other than what he thinks as naturally as if he really thought it, and at last forgetting his own place by taking someone else’s. What is the profession of the actor? A trade by which he gives himself in performance for money, submits himself to the ignominy and affronts that people buy the right to give him, and puts his person publicly on sale.7

This was not conventional moralizing but serious reflection on the insight that civilization encourages and rewards inauthentic behavior.

During these years, Rousseau was still living in France, but his religious and political ideas provoked official outrage there. The Catholic Church, which controlled education and censored every legally published book, was scandalized by the liberal treatment of religion in Émile. The Social Contract was similarly unacceptable to the authoritarian monarchy, and both books were publicly burned. Other philosophes often held subversive views, but they published them anonymously. Rousseau defiantly signed his own name to his books, and he was singled out as a scapegoat for the entire Enlightenment movement. A warrant was issued for his arrest, and he was given warning just in time to flee the country.

Return to Geneva was impossible, even though he had reconverted to Protestantism, since Émile and the Social Contract were proscribed there, too. Instead, he made his way to the territory of Neuchâtel, ruled at that time by Frederick the Great of Prussia, who liked to think of himself as a philosopher king. Thérèse soon followed, replying when Rousseau said he would understand if she didn’t share in his persecution, “My heart has always been yours and will never change, so long as God gives you life and me as well. … I would go to join you even if I had to cross oceans and precipices.”8

Three years later, after local Calvinist ministers stirred up mob hostility on account of Rousseau’s religious views, he and Thérèse were driven from Switzerland, too. At the invitation of David Hume they moved to England, in what proved a highly unfortunate choice. Rather than stay in London, where French was widely understood, they retreated to a remote village in the Midlands, and by the end of a bitterly cold winter Rousseau had become alarmingly paranoid. Convinced that Hume, of all people, was masterminding a vast plot against him, he fled back to France and went into hiding there. Eventually he resolved to return to Paris and confront his accusers. They

failed to appear. By that time he had ceased publishing, and the authorities were reluctant to make a martyr of him.

So Rousseau lived out his final decade in Paris, enjoying music and pursuing an avocation of collecting plants in the countryside. Speaking of himself in his late, unpublished Dialogues, he explained: “It is through idleness, nonchalance, and aversion to dependency and bother that Jean- Jacques copies music. He does his task as and when it pleases him; he doesn’t have to account for his day, his time, his labor, or his leisure to anyone. … He is himself, and for himself, all day and every day.”9 In effect he was trying to re-create the condition of natural man.

The paranoia remained, but it was successfully compartmentalized, a firewall that enabled Rousseau to avoid uncomfortable contact with strangers and to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. The younger writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, who often accompanied him on his walks, recalled an eloquent comment of his on the singing of the nightingale: “Our musicians have all imitated its high and low notes, its runs and capriccios, but what characterizes it—its prolonged piping, its sobs, the sighing sounds that go to the soul and pervade its song—that is what no one has been able to capture.”10

A collision in the street with a galloping Great Dane resulted in concussion and lasting brain damage, and Rousseau died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1778, at the age of sixty-six.

After his death several posthumous works were published, most notably the great Confessions, which stands with its namesake by Saint Augustine as the most original and influential auto biographies ever written. Rousseau seems to have been literally the first writer to do what now seems inevitable, to seek the roots of personality in early relationships and experiences. The title of Marcel Proust’s great cycle of novels, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, could easily be Rousseau’s: “In Search of Lost Time.” His richest recoveries of the past are concentrated in the first three books of the twelve- book Confessions, which are included in their entirety in this volume.

One of the most memorable passages in the later books recreates a sensation of unalloyed contentment that Rousseau liked to call le sentiment de l’existence, the consciousness of simply being alive. He and Mme de Warens had just moved to a country house known as Les Charmettes:

Here begins the brief happiness of my life; here come the peaceful but rapid moments that have given me the right to say I have lived. Precious moments that I miss so much, ah! begin again for me your pleasant course; flow more slowly in my memory, if that is possible, than you actually did in your fleeting succession. If all of that consisted in doings, in actions, in words, I would be able to describe and render it to some extent; but how can I say what was never said, or done, or even thought, but tasted and felt, so that I can name no object for my happiness except the feeling itself? I got up with the sun and was happy, I took a walk and was happy, I saw Maman [Mme de Warens] and was happy, I left her and was happy, I roamed the woods and hills, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I was idle, I worked in the garden, I gathered fruit, I helped around the house, and happiness followed me everywhere. It wasn’t in any single thing one could identify, it was entirely in myself, and it couldn’t leave me for a single moment.11

In truth, this was a flight of imagination more than an accurate reminiscence; we know from Rousseau’s letters that most of the time at Les Charmettes he lived alone, unhappy and neglected.

Rousseau’s influence as an analyst of culture developed gradually; his influence as a political thinker bore fruit more immediately. When Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, two years before Rousseau’s death, that all men are created equal and possess unalienable rights, he was using Rousseauian language. And in 1789 the political time bomb of the Social Contract burst. The leaders of the French Revolution, with their ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, hailed Rousseau as a prophet. His remains were reinterred with immense pomp in the Panthéon in Paris, and according to the official account of the occasion, “The moon that shed its pale and colorless light gave this procession the aspect of those ancient mysteries whose initiates were pure or washed clean of their faults.” Especially notable was a delegation from his native city, marching with a banner that read “Aristocratic Geneva proscribed him, a regenerated Geneva has avenged his memory.”12

In the ensuing years Rousseau’s influence continued to spread. Romanticism, with its emphasis on originality, imagination, and oneness with nature, was profoundly in his debt. The growing recognition that governments should reflect their people’s will, together with the conviction that social inequality is intrinsically unjust, have profound roots in his thought. The concept of childhood as a crucially formative stage of development is Rousseauian at its heart. And psychoanalysis, searching for hidden foundations of the self, carries forward the quest that he launched in the Confessions.

Rousseau never wanted to found a system, and he didn’t. His mission was to expose the unreconciled conflicts that make human life so difficult and that conventional systems of politics and education and psychology try to iron out. At a friend’s house, he once took a peach from the bottom of a pyramid of fruit, upon which the whole thing fell down. “That’s what you always do with all our systems,” she commented; “you pull down with a single touch, but who will build up what you pull down?”13 By pulling down, he challenged later generations to build up again in new ways, and his style of questioning has become inseparable from our culture. “The friends of Rousseau,” one friend of his remarked, “are as though related to each other through his soul, which has joined them across countries, ranks, fortune, and even centuries.”14 Many people who have barely heard of him are, at a deep level, friends of Rousseau.

LEO DAMROSCH, is Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including Tocqueville’s Discovery of America and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award in nonfiction.

DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN

In 1755, five years after Rousseau’s Discourse on the Sciences and Arts made him unexpectedly famous, he once again responded to an essay competition announced by the Academy of Dijon. The topic this time was “What is the origin of inequality among men, and is it authorized by natural law?” The Academy rejected his submission because it greatly exceeded the length limit, which didn’t matter to Rousseau, because it was immediately published and proved to be a work of extraordinary originality.

Instead of tracing the phenomenon of inequality historically, as would have been usual at the time, this second Discourse is a thought experiment that attempts to discover what would be truly natural to human beings if society had never shaped them at all. “Natural man” is imagined as essentially an animal, solitary and unsocial, open to feeling but with no need of reason, and with no wish or occasion to exploit other people. The development of society brought with it much that was good, particularly the mutual love and support of family life, and we could never return to the state of nature. But the negative consequences have been immense: the very fact of needing other human beings has led everywhere to joyless labor, inequality, and oppression. Rousseau’s central message—immensely influential in later generations—is that social inequality is universal but it is also wrong. Still, to the extent that “natural man” survives at a deep level inside us, we can try to live according to Nature and to open ourselves to spontaneity of feeling.

PREFACE

The most useful of the natural sciences, yet the least advanced, strikes me as being the science of man, and I will venture to say that at the Temple of Delphi the only inscription contained a precept more important and difficult than all the copious volumes of the moralists.15 I also regard the subject of the following discourse as consisting of the most interesting questions that philosophy can propose and, unfortunately for us, one of the most contentious that the philosophers seek to resolve. For how can we understand the source of the inequality among men if we do not begin by understanding them? And how can man ultimately succeed in seeing himself as nature formed him through all the changes that the succession of time and circumstances must have produced in his original constitution, and disentangle what is innate in him from what circumstances and his progress have added or changed in his original state? Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, the sea, and storms had so disfigured that it resembled less a god than a wild beast, the human soul, altered in the bosom of society by a thousand perpetually recurring causes, by the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and multitude of errors, by the changes befalling the constitution of the body and by the continual impact of the passions, has changed so as to be hardly recognizable.16 And one no longer finds beings that always act according to firm and invariable principles, beings with the celestial and majestic simplicity that their creator imprinted on them; instead one finds the misshapen contrast of a passion that believes it reasons and an understanding that is frenzied.

What is even more cruel is that all progress made by the human species ceaselessly moves it ever further from its original state: the more discoveries we make and the more new knowledge we accumulate, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all, and it is in a sense, through studying man that we have made ourselves incapable of knowing him.

It is clear that it is in these successive changes of the human constitution that one must look for the initial origin of the differences that distinguish men who were, by common consent, naturally as equal among one another as the animals of every species until diverse physical causes introduced the varieties that we see in them. In fact, it is not conceivable that these first changes, however they may have come about, would have altered all the individuals of a species at once and in the same manner; while some would have been improved or caused to deteriorate, having acquired various good or bad qualities that were not inherent in their nature, others would have remained longer in their original state. Such was the first source of inequality among men, and it is easier to present it in general terms such as these than to assign its true causes with precision.

Let my readers therefore not imagine that I dare flatter myself at having seen what seems to me so difficult to see. I have initiated some arguments and hazarded a few conjectures, less in the hope of resolving the question than with the intention of shedding light on its true state. Others will be able to go further along the same path without it being easy for anyone to reach the end, since it is not an easy task to disentangle what is original from what is artificial in man’s present nature, and to know well a state that no longer exists and that perhaps never has existed nor ever will, and yet of which it is necessary to have precise notions in order to judge our present state correctly.17 He who would undertake to determine the precise steps necessary to make sound observations on this subject would certainly need more philosophy than one would imagine, and a good solution to the following problem strikes me as being worthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our day: “What experiments would be necessary to achieve an understanding of natural man, and what are the methods by which such experiments should be conducted within society?” Far from undertaking to resolve this question, I believe I have meditated enough on the subject to dare reply in advance that the greatest philosophers would not be suitable for conducting these experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns to perform them. It is hardly reasonable to expect such a collaboration to succeed, particularly as it would need perseverance, or rather a confluence of intellect and goodwill on both sides.

And yet such an investigation, which is so difficult to undertake and to which until now such little thought has been given, is the only means left to us of dispersing a multitude of difficulties that prevent our knowing the true foundations of human society. It is the ignorance of man’s nature that casts so much uncertainty and obscurity on the true definition of natural right: for the idea of right, says Monsieur Burlamaqui,18 and even more that of natural right, are incontestably ideas relating to the nature of man. It is from the very nature of man, Monsieur Burlamaqui continues, and from his constitution and condition, that the principles of this science must be deduced.

It is with some surprise or shock that one notes how little agreement prevails on this important matter among the authors who have treated these issues. Among the soundest, one will not find two who are of the same opinion on this point—not to mention the ancient philosophers, who seem to have made it their mission to contradict one another on the most fundamental principles. The Roman jurists indiscriminately placed man and all the other animals under the same natural law, since they considered natural law the law that nature imposes upon itself rather than the one it prescribes; or because of the specific meaning under which these jurists understood the word law, which in this instance they seem to have taken to mean the expression of the general relations established by nature among all animate beings for their preservation. As men of our era understand law only to mean a rule prescribed to a moral being (that is to say, a being that is intelligent, free, and considered in its relation to other beings), they consequently restrict the domain of natural law to the only animal endowed with reason, that is to say man. But while they all define this law in their own way, they base it on such metaphysical principles that there are, even among us, very few people capable of understanding them, let alone discovering them of their own accord. Accordingly, all the definitions provided by these learned men, who are otherwise in perpetual disagreement with one another, agree only on this point: that it is impossible to understand the law of nature, and consequently to obey it, without being a truly great thinker and profound metaphysician. What this means is that for the establishment of society, men have had to employ an intelligence that develops only with great difficulty, and for very few people, in the bosom of society itself.

With such limited knowledge of nature and such a lack of agreement on the meaning of the word law, it would be quite difficult to agree on an adequate definition of natural law. Consequently, all the definitions found in books have, besides the defect of lacking in consistency, the further defect of being derived from several fields of knowledge that men do not have innately, and from advantages of which they cannot conceive until after they have left the state of nature.19 One begins by considering what rules would be appropriate for men to establish among themselves for the common interest, and one then gives the name natural law to the collection of these rules without any other proof than the good that one feels would result from their universal implementation. This is certainly a convenient way of creating definitions and explaining the nature of things through concurrences that are almost arbitrary.

But so long as we do not know man in his natural condition, it is in vain that we seek to determine the law that he has received or the one that best suits his constitution. The only thing about this law we can see clearly is that for it to be a law, the will of him whom it binds must be able to submit himself to it consciously; but in order for this law to be natural, it must also speak immediately with the voice of nature.

Casting aside all the scientific books that only teach us to see men as they have made themselves, and reflecting on the first and most simple operation of the human spirit, I believe I perceive two principles antecedent to reason, of which one interests us intensely in our well-being and self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance at seeing any sentient being, particularly a fellow human, perish or suffer. It is from the collaboration and combination of the two principles of which our minds are capable, without it being necessary to introduce the principle of sociability, that, it seems to me, all the rules of natural law flow; rules that reason is then forced to reestablish on other foundations when, by its successive developments, it has succeeded in stifling nature.

In this way, one is not obliged to make man into a philosopher before making him into a man. His duty toward others is not solely dictated by belated lessons of wisdom, and so long as he does not resist the inner impulse to commiserate he will never do harm to another man or another sentient being, except in the legitimate case where his self-preservation is concerned,

in which he is obliged to give preference to himself. By these means one also ends the ancient disputes as to whether animals are part of natural law, as it is clear that since they lack intellect and freedom, they cannot recognize this law; and yet, sharing to some extent as they do in our nature through the sensibility with which they are endowed, it would seem that animals ought also to share in natural right, and that man is subject to some form of duty toward them. In fact, it would appear that if I am obliged not to do any harm to a fellow man, it is less because he is a rational being than because he is a sentient one, a quality which, being common to both man and beast, must at least give the one the right not to be needlessly ill-treated by the other.

This same study of original man, of his true needs and the fundamental principles of his duty, is furthermore the only good means of dispelling the myriad difficulties that arise concerning the origin of moral inequality, the true foundations of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of its members, and a thousand other such questions, which are as important as they are opaque.

Looking at society with a calm and objective eye, it at first appears to exhibit only the violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak. Our minds are repelled by the harshness of the former, and we are driven to lament the blindness of the latter. Nothing is less stable among men than these external relationships, which are more often the product of chance than of wisdom, and which one calls weakness or power, wealth or poverty; consequently, the institutions of man seem at first glance to be built on sand. It is only upon examining them up close, when the dust and sand that surround the edifice have been swept away, that one can see the unshakable foundations upon which it is built and learns to respect these foundations. For without the serious study of man and his natural faculties and their successive development, one will never succeed in making such distinctions and in separating in the present state of things what the divine will has done from what human skill claims to have done. The political and moral investigations to which the important question I am examining give rise are consequently useful in every way, and the hypothetical history of government is in every way an instructive lesson for man. By considering what we would have become had we been abandoned to ourselves, we must learn to bless Him whose beneficent hand, by correcting our institutions and giving them an unshakable foundation, has anticipated the disorders that would have

resulted, thus instigating our happiness by means that seemed destined to complete our misery.

DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN

It is of man that I have to speak, and the question I shall examine assures that I will be speaking openly, as one does not propose such questions to one’s fellow men when one is afraid of honoring the truth. I will, therefore, defend the cause of humanity with confidence before the wise men who invite me to do so, and shall be pleased if I prove worthy of my subject and my judges.

In my view there are two sorts of inequality in the human species: one I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature and consists of differences in age, health, physical strength, and qualities of the mind or soul; the other, one might call moral or political inequality, because it depends on some sort of mutual agreement, and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of men. This inequality consists of the various privileges that some enjoy at the expense of others, such as being wealthier, more honored, and more powerful than they, or even making themselves obeyed.

One cannot ask what the source of natural inequality is, because the simple definition of the term would be provided as an answer. Even less can one inquire if there is not some essential connection between the two inequalities, for that would be to ask in different terms if those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and if the power of the body or the mind, and wisdom or virtue, are always found in the same individuals in proportion to their power or wealth: this is a good question, perhaps, in a debate among slaves within earshot of their masters, but it is not fitting for free men of reason who are engaged in a quest for truth.

What, then, is this discourse about? Its aim is to mark within the progression of things the moment in which rights succeeded violence, and nature was subjected to law; to explain by what sequence of miracles the powerful might resolve to serve the weak and the people purchase an imaginary repose at the price of true happiness.

All the philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have felt compelled to go back to the state of nature, but not one has succeeded. Some have not hesitated to suppose that men living in a natural state had the notion of what was just and unjust, without troubling to show that they must already have had that notion, or even that it would have been useful to them to have it. Others have spoken of a natural right that each individual has to protect what belongs to him, yet without explaining what they understand by belongs. Others again, after first granting authority to the more powerful over the weaker, immediately created a government without giving thought to the time that had to elapse before the words authority and government could attain meaning among men. Finally, all the philosophers, speaking constantly of need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride, imbued the state of nature with ideas they had found in society. They spoke of savage man but depicted civilized man. It did not even occur to most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of nature once existed, whereas it is evident from the Holy Scriptures that the first man, having instantly received intellect and precepts from God, was himself not in a state of nature at all; and if one gives the writings of Moses the credence that every Christian philosopher owes them, one must say that even before the Deluge men never existed in a pure state of nature, unless they lapsed into it by some extraordinary occurrence; a paradox that is most difficult to defend and altogether impossible to prove.

Let us therefore begin by setting aside all the facts, for they do not touch on the problem.20 One must not take the inquiries into which one can enter on this subject as historical truths, but merely as hypothetical and conditional reasoning. These are better suited to elucidate the nature of things than to show their true origin, and are comparable to the hypotheses that our natural scientists make every day on the formation of the world. Religion commands us to believe that God Himself drew men out of the state of nature immediately after the Creation, and that men are unequal because he willed them to be so. But religion does not forbid us to form conjectures drawn exclusively from the nature of man and the creatures surrounding him, or to conjecture what might have happened to mankind had it been left to itself. This is what I am asked, and this is what I intend to examine in this discourse. Since my subject concerns man in general, I will strive to adopt a language suited to all nations, or, rather, forgetting times and places in order

to think only about the men to whom I am speaking, I shall imagine myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters, having as my judges Platos and Xenocrateses, and mankind as my auditors.21

Listen, O man, from whatever country you may be, whatever your opinions! Here is your history such as I believe to read it, not in books written by your fellow men, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies. Everything that comes from nature will be true. Nothing will be false, except what I might unintentionally have included of my own. The times of which I shall speak are very distant. How much you have changed from what you once were! It is, so to speak, the life of your species I will describe to you according to the qualities that you have received, and that your education and your habits have been able to corrupt but not destroy. There is, I believe, an age at which an individual might want to stop growing older; you will look for the age at which you wish your species to have gone no further. Discontented with your present state for reasons that herald even greater discontent for your unfortunate posterity, you might perhaps wish to be able to go back in time. And this sentiment must lead to the praise of your first ancestors, the criticism of your contemporaries, and dread for those who will have the misfortune of living after you.

PART ONE

As important as it might be to consider man from his origins in order to judge his natural state, and examine him, so to speak, in the original embryonic state of his species, I will not follow his development through its successive stages. I will not pause to search in his biology for what he might have been at the beginning in order to eventually become what he is now. I will not examine if, as Aristotle believes, man’s elongated nails might originally have been hooked claws, if he was hairy like a bear, and if, walking on all fours, his eyes directed at the ground and confined to a few paces ahead, whether this did not shape the character and also the limits of his ideas. On this question I could form only vague, almost imaginary, conjectures. Comparative anatomy has still made too little progress, and the observations of natural scientists are still too uncertain, to allow for a solid foundation on such a subject. Thus, without turning to supernatural knowledge on this subject, and without regard to the changes that have taken place in man’s inner and outer form as he gradually began to apply his limbs to new uses and to nourish himself on new foods, I will assume him to have always had the form I see him having today, walking on two feet, making use of his hands as we make use of ours, directing his eyes at all of nature and surveying with them the vast expanse of heaven.

In stripping this being, constituted as he is, of all the supernatural gifts he might have received, and of all the artificial faculties that he could have acquired only by a long progress; in considering this being, in short, such as he must have emerged from the hands of nature, I see an animal that is less strong than some, less agile than others, but, in sum, formed in the most advantageous way of all. I see him satisfying his hunger beneath an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, making his bed beneath the same tree that furnished him his meal—thus his needs are satisfied.

Abandoned to its natural fertility and covered by immense forests that the ax had never mutilated, the earth offers at every step food and shelter to

animals of every species. Men, dispersed among them, observe and imitate their industry and thus raise themselves to the instinct of beasts, with the advantage that each species has merely its own instincts, while man, having perhaps none that are his own, appropriates them all, nourishing himself equally on a wide selection of foods that other animals share, consequently finding his sustenance with greater ease than any of the others.

Men have developed a robust and almost unchanging temperament, accustomed as they had been from childhood to the inclemency of the weather and the rigors of the seasons, worked to exhaustion and forced, unarmed and exposed to the elements, to guard their lives and their prey against other wild beasts or to run away from them. The children, coming into the world with the excellent constitution of their fathers, and fortifying this constitution with the same practices that created it, acquired all the vigor of which the human species is capable. Nature treated these children exactly as the law of Sparta treated the children of its citizens: it made those with a good constitution strong and robust and made all the others perish, thus differing from our societies, where the state, rendering children burdensome to their fathers, kills them indiscriminately before they are born.

As the body of the savage man is the only instrument he knows, he puts it to various uses of which our unaccustomed bodies are incapable, and it is our machines that rob us of the strength and dexterity which necessity obliges savage man to acquire. If he had had an ax, could his wrists have smashed such powerful branches? If he had had a sling, could he have thrown a stone with his hand with such might? If he had had a ladder, would he have climbed a tree with such ease? If he had had a horse, could he have run so fast? Give civilized man enough time to gather all his machines about him, and one can be certain that he will overcome savage man with ease. But if you want to see an even more unequal contest, pitch them against one another naked and unarmed, and you will soon see the true advantage of constantly having all your strength at hand, of always being ready for any eventuality, and always being, so to speak, entirely complete within oneself.

Hobbes claims that man is naturally intrepid and seeks only to attack and fight. Another illustrious philosopher, on the contrary, thinks (as both Cumberland and Pufendorf also assert) that there is nothing as timid as man in the state of nature; that he is always trembling and ready to flee at the

slightest noise he hears, the slightest movement he sees.22 That might be true of objects he does not know, and I do not doubt that he is frightened by every new thing he sees whenever he cannot distinguish the physical good or evil he is to expect, or compare his strength to the dangers he is facing—rare circumstances in the state of nature, where everything progresses in such a uniform fashion, and where the face of the earth is not subject to abrupt and continuing changes triggered by the passions and impulses of men living in society. But savage man, living dispersed among animals and finding himself compelled to measure himself against them, is quick to make the comparison, and feeling that he surpasses them, in skill more than strength, learns not to fear them anymore. Set a bear or a wolf against a savage who is strong, agile, and courageous, as all savage men are, arm him with stones and a good club, and you will see that the danger is at most mutual, and that after several encounters of the kind, ferocious beasts that avoid attacking one another will also avoid attacking man, whom they will have found just as ferocious as they are themselves. As for animals that really have more strength than he has skill, man finds himself in the same situation as other weaker species that nevertheless continue to survive. He has the advantage of being as ready to flee as they are, and finding almost certain refuge in the trees, he always has the choice of taking on or avoiding an encounter and of choosing to fight or flee. Let us add that it does not appear that any animal naturally wages war against man except in a case of self-defense or extreme hunger, or bears him any violent antipathies that seem to announce that one species is destined by nature to serve as fodder for another.

(No doubt this is why negroes and savages worry so little about ferocious beasts that they might encounter in the forests. The Caribs of Venezuela, among others, in this respect live in great security without the least trouble. Though almost naked, they boldly face danger armed only with bow and arrow, François Corréal says, but one has never heard that any of them have ever been devoured by beasts.)23

More formidable enemies, against which man does not have the same means to defend himself, are the natural infirmities: infancy, old age, and illnesses of every kind—sad signs of our weakness, of which the first two are common to all animals, while illnesses mainly assail man living in society. I also note, on the subject of infancy, that a mother, carrying her child with her

everywhere, can feed it with much greater ease than the females of many other species that are forced to exhaust themselves going back and forth, on one side to find food, on the other to suckle or feed their young. It is true that if the woman perishes the child is at great risk of perishing with her, but this danger is common to countless other species where the young are not capable of foraging for food on their own. And if the duration of childhood is longer among us, our lives being longer, then everything is more or less equal in this respect, although there are other rules concerning the duration of dependence and the number of young that are not relevant to my subject. With old people who are less active and perspire little, the need for food diminishes along with the ability to provide for it. And as the way of life of savages keeps gout and rheumatism at bay—and old age, among all the ills, is the one ill that human aid can least alleviate—they end up expiring without anyone discerning that they have ceased to exist, and almost without realizing it themselves.

As for illnesses, I will not repeat the futile and false declarations against medicine that most healthy people make, but will ask if there is any reliable evidence from which one can conclude that in those countries where the art of medicine is most neglected, the average life of man is shorter than in countries where it is pursued with greater zeal; and how could this be, if we unleash in ourselves more illnesses than those for which medicine can provide remedies! There is the extreme inequality in men’s way of life, an excess of idleness in some and work in others; there is the ease with which our appetites and senses are aroused and satisfied; there is the food of the rich that is too sumptuous, and that inflames humors and triggers indigestion; the bad food of the poor, who often have no food at all, the lack of which leads them to voraciously overburden their stomachs when they have the chance; nights of revelry, excesses of every kind, the immodest raptures of the passions, the exhaustion of the mind, and the vexation and countless sorrows that man experiences in all stations of life and which perpetually gnaw at the soul; all this is dire proof that most of our illnesses are of our own doing, and that we could have avoided almost all of them had we conserved a way of life that is simple, constant, and retiring, as nature has prescribed. If nature destined us to be healthy, I almost dare to assume that a contemplative state is one contrary to nature, and that a man who reflects is a depraved animal.24

When one thinks of the good condition that savages are in, at least those we have not ruined with our strong liquor, when one discerns that they barely know any illnesses other than injury and old age, one is very much led to believe that one could map the history of human illness by following the diseases of civil societies. This, at least, is the opinion of Plato, who evaluates certain remedies used or esteemed by Podalirius and Machaon at the siege of Troy that were not yet known among men. [And Celsus reports that dieting, which today is so necessary, was first invented by Hippocrates.]25

Having such few sources of illness, men in the state of nature consequently have little need for medicine, and even less for doctors; in this respect the human species is not in worse condition than all the other species, and it is easy to inquire from hunters whether they come across many ailing animals. They encounter a number of animals that have suffered severe injuries that had healed, animals that have had bones and even limbs broken that became whole again, with time as their only surgeon, everyday life their only therapy; animals that were no less perfectly healed for not having been tormented with incisions, poisoned with drugs, or wasted by fasting. Finally, regardless of how useful well-administered medicine might be among us, it is always certain that if a sick savage, abandoned, has only nature to rely on, he has, on the other hand, nothing to fear but his illness, which frequently renders his situation preferable to ours.

Let us therefore beware of confusing savage men with the men around us. Nature treats all animals abandoned to her care with a predilection that seems to show how jealously she guards her right. The horse, the cat, the bull, even the donkey, are for the most part better formed, have a constitution that is more robust, have more vigor, strength, and courage in the forests than they do in our barns and stables. They lose half these advantages when they become domesticated, and one would say that all our efforts to feed and treat them well lead only to their being bastardized. The same is true of man: in becoming socialized and a slave he ends up weak, timid, and mean-spirited, his soft, effeminate way of life finally draining both his strength and his courage. Let us also add that between the savage state and the domestic state, the difference between one man and another must be even greater than that between one beast and another. Since nature has treated man and beast equally, all the conveniences that man gives himself beyond those he gives

the animals he tames are among the many causes that lead him to degenerate more visibly.

It is consequently not such a great misfortune for these first men, nor indeed such an obstacle to their survival, to be naked and to lack shelter and all the useless things we deem so necessary. Though their skin is not covered by fur, in warm countries they have no need of it, and in cold countries they quickly learn to appropriate the skins of the beasts they have slain. If they have only two feet with which to run, they have two arms with which to provide for their defense and their needs; their children perhaps walk late and with difficulty, but the mothers carry them with ease, an advantage lacking in other species where a mother, if she is pursued, sees herself compelled to abandon her young or limit her speed to theirs. Finally, unless one considers the singular and fortuitous concurrence of the circumstances of which I will speak subsequently, a concurrence that might very well not happen, it is clear that, all things considered, the first man who made himself clothes or built himself a lodging provided himself with things that he did not particularly need, since until then he had done without them, and it is hard to see why he could not as a grown man endure the kind of life he had endured since childhood.

Alone, unconstrained by labor, and never far from danger, savage man must like to sleep as do animals that think little and so, one could say, sleep all the time that they are not thinking. Self-preservation being savage man’s practically sole concern, his most developed faculties must be those that have as their object attack and defense, either to overcome his prey or to keep himself from becoming the prey of another animal. In contrast, the organs that are only perfected by a soft and sensual way of life must remain in a rough state that prevents in him any kind of delicacy; his senses end up divided, the savage man having an extremely coarse sense of touch and taste while his senses of sight, hearing, and smell are of the greatest subtlety. Such is the animal state in general, and also, according to the reports of travelers, the state of most savage peoples. It is therefore not surprising that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope can with their naked eye spot ships far out at sea, for which the Dutch need a telescope, or that the savages of the Americas can scent the trail of a Spaniard as well as the best dogs might, or that all the barbarous nations can bear their nudity with ease, sharpen their taste with hot peppers, and drink European liquor like water.

So far I have considered only physical man. Let us now try to look at him from a metaphysical and moral side.

I see in every animal simply an ingenious machine that nature has endowed with senses so that it can by itself refurbish, and to a certain extent shield itself, from all that seeks to destroy or disrupt it. I see precisely the same in the human machine, with the only difference that nature alone directs everything in the life of a beast, while man in his role as free agent partakes in the process. A beast chooses or rejects by instinct, while man does so through free acts, with the result that a beast cannot distance itself from the rules prescribed for it, even when it would be to its advantage, and with the result that man often distances himself to his disadvantage. A pigeon will die of hunger beside a bowl filled with choice meat, as will a cat on a pile of fruit or grain, though each could very well have nourished itself from the food it disdains had it known to try it. It is thus that dissolute men abandon themselves to excesses that cause fever and death, because the mind depraves the senses, and the will continues to speak when nature falls silent.

Since every animal has senses it has ideas, even connecting them to a certain degree. Man differs from beasts in this respect only insofar as larger quantities differ from lesser. Some philosophers have even proposed that there is a greater difference between one man and another than between a man and a beast. Accordingly, it is not so much man’s capacity to understand that specifically distinguishes him from animals, as it is his being a free agent. Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man experiences the same command but recognizes that he is free to yield to it or reject it. And it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul manifests itself, for physics to some extent explains the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas, but in the power of wanting or, rather, choosing, and in the awareness of this power, one finds purely spiritual acts in which nothing can be explained by the laws of mechanics.

But even if the difficulties surrounding all these questions would leave some room for disagreement about this difference between man and animal, there is another very specific quality that distinguishes them and about which there can be no argument, and that is the faculty of improving oneself. With the aid of circumstances, this faculty successively develops all the others, and resides within us both as a species and as individuals, while an animal, on the other hand, becomes within several months what it will be for the rest of its

life, while its whole species will in a thousand years still be what it was in the very first year of that millennium. Why is man alone subject to becoming imbecilic? Is it not that in this way he is returning to his primitive state, while the beast, which has not acquired anything, has nothing to lose, always remaining with its instinct? Does not man, losing through old age or some mishap everything that his faculty of self-improvement has led him to acquire, fall lower even than the beast? It would be sad if we were forced to agree that this distinctive and almost boundless human faculty is the source of all man’s miseries, that it is this faculty that draws him, by the action of time, from the original condition in which he would spend tranquil and innocent days; that it is this faculty, engendering over the centuries his intellect, his errors, his virtues, and his vices, which in the end makes him his own and nature’s tyrant. It would be terrible to be led to praise as benefactor the man who first suggested to the people of the Orinoco the use of the boards they apply to the temples of their children’s heads, which assures them of at least some of their imbecility and original happiness.

Nature leaves savage man entirely to his instincts, or, rather, compensates him for the instincts he perhaps lacks, by giving him faculties capable of initially supplementing these instincts and then raising him well above them. But savage man begins with purely animal functions: perceiving and feeling will be his initial state, a state he shares with all animals. Wanting and not wanting, desiring and fearing, will be the first and almost only function of man’s soul until new circumstances bring about new developments in it.

Whatever moralists may say, human understanding owes much to the passions, which, as is commonly admitted, also owe much to human understanding. It is through the activity of the passions that our reason improves itself; we seek knowledge only because we desire pleasure, and it is impossible to conceive why he who has neither desires nor fears might go to the trouble of reasoning. Passions, on the other hand, owe their origin to our needs and their progress to our knowledge, as one cannot desire or fear things except by way of ideas that one might have of them, or by way of the simple impulse of nature. Savage man, deprived of any sort of intellect, experiences only passions of this last kind; his desires do not exceed his physical needs. The only good he recognizes in the universe is food, a female, and sleep; the only evils he fears are pain and hunger; I say pain and not death, since an animal does not ever know what it is to die, while the knowledge of death

and its terrors is one of man’s first acquisitions as he distances himself from the animal condition.

It would be easy, were it necessary, for me to support these impressions with facts, and to prove that in all the nations of the world the progress of the mind is exactly proportional to the needs that peoples received from nature or to which circumstances had subjected them, and consequently proportional to the passions that drove them to satisfy those needs. I would show the arts emerging in Egypt and spreading with the floodings of the Nile; I would follow their development among the Greeks, where the arts sprouted, grew, and rose to the heavens from among the sands and rocks of Attica, without being able to strike root on the fertile banks of the Eurotas. I would point out that in general the people of the north are more industrious than those of the south because they can less afford not to be, as if nature were striving in this way to balance things by giving minds the fertility it denies the soil.

Even without resorting to the uncertain testimonies of history, is it not clear that everything appears to quell savage man’s impulse and means to cease being savage? His imagination depicts nothing, his heart asks nothing. His modest needs are so readily at hand, and he is so far from the degree of knowledge necessary to want to acquire more, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity. He is indifferent to the spectacle of nature because he is so familiar with it; it is always the same order, the same pattern. He does not have the intellect to be surprised by these great wonders, and it is not to him that one turns to seek the philosophy man needs if he is to notice what he has seen every day. His soul, which nothing perturbs, gives itself solely to the feeling of his present existence without any idea of the future, regardless of how close that future might be, and his ventures, limited like his horizon, barely extend to the end of the day. Such is even today the Carib’s extent of foresight: he sells his cotton mat in the morning and then comes crying in the evening to buy it back, having failed to foresee that he would need it for the coming night.

The more one reflects on the subject, the more the distance between pure sensations and the simplest knowledge grows before our eyes, and it is impossible to conceive how man could have crossed such a great divide with nothing but his own strength, without the help of communication, and without being driven by necessity. How many centuries must have passed before man was capable of seeing another fire than that of the heavens? How

many different accidents and coincidences were necessary for him to learn the simplest uses of this element? How many times must he have let the fire go out before acquiring the art of reproducing it? And how many times did these secrets perhaps die along with him who had discovered them? What can we say about agriculture, a craft that demands so much toil and foresight, is so dependent on other skills, which is obviously practicable only where a society has at least begun to exist, and which serves not so much to draw from the earth food it would readily yield, but to compel it to cater to the preferences of our taste? But let us suppose that men had multiplied to the extent that natural produce was no longer adequate to feed them, a supposition, it should be said, which would affirm the great advantage of that way of life for the human species. Let us suppose that tools for farming had fallen straight from Heaven into the hands of savages without there ever having been forges or workshops. Let us suppose that these savages had overcome mankind’s abhorrence of unrelenting labor, and that they had learned to foresee their needs far enough in advance to figure out how to cultivate the soil, sow seeds, and plant trees. Let us suppose that they would have discovered the arts of grinding wheat and fermenting grapes, all of which the gods would have had to teach them, as one cannot conceive their learning these skills on their own. What man in such a condition would be senseless enough to torment himself by cultivating a field that would be plundered by the first man or beast to take a liking to its crop? And how could any man resolve to spend his life engaged in arduous labor, of which the more he needs its rewards the more certain he can be that he will not reap them? In short, how could such a situation lead men to cultivate land that has not been divided among them, that is to say, if the state of nature has not been abolished?

Even if we were to suppose savage man as adroit in the art of reasoning as our philosophers would have him be, or if we followed the example of the philosophers and made the savage an actual philosopher himself, one who independently discovers the most sublime truths and who, by a sequence of abstract reasoning, reaches principles of justice and reason derived from an innate love of order or from his knowledge of his creator’s will; in short, even if we suppose that a savage man’s mind has as much intelligence and intellect as it would need to have, and we then find it to be dull and stupid, what benefit would the species draw from all this metaphysics, from a philosophy

that could not be communicated and that would be lost with the individual who had invented it? What progress could mankind make, scattered in the forests among the animals? And to what extent could men improve and instruct each other if they had no fixed abode or need for one another, encountering each other once or twice in their lives without knowing or speaking to the other?