A DISCOURSE ON A SUBJECT PROPOSED
BY THE ACADEMY OF DIJON:
WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN,
AND IS IT AUTHORISED BY NATURAL LAW?
Jean Jacques Rousseau 1754
Translated by G. D. H. Cole, public
domain
Rendered into HTML and text by Jon Roland
of the Constitution Society
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A DISSERTATION ON THE ORIGIN AND
FOUNDATION OF THE INEQUALITY OF MANKIND
. . . Let us begin then by laying facts
aside, as they do not affect the question. The investigations we may enter
into, in treating this subject, must not be considered as historical truths,
but only as mere conditional and hypothetical reasonings, rather calculated to
explain the nature of things, than to ascertain their actual origin; just like
the hypotheses which our physicists daily form respecting the formation of the
world. Religion commands us to believe that, God Himself having taken men out
of a state of nature immediately after the creation, they are unequal only
because it is His will they should be so: but it does not forbid us to form
conjectures based solely on the nature of man, and the beings around him,
concerning what might have become of the human race, if it had been left to
itself. This then is the question asked me, and that which I propose to discuss
in the following discourse. As my subject interests mankind in general, I shall
endeavour to make use of a style adapted to all nations, or rather, forgetting
time and place, to attend only to men to whom I am speaking. I shall suppose
myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating the lessons of my masters, with Plato
and Xenocrates for judges, and the whole human race for audience.
O man, of whatever country you are, and
whatever your opinions may be, behold your history, such as I have thought to
read it, not in books written by your fellow-creatures, who are liars, but in
nature, which never lies. All that comes from her will be true; nor will you
meet with anything false, unless I have involuntarily put in something of my
own. The times of which I am going to speak are very remote: how much are you
changed from what you once were! It is, so to speak, the life of your species
which I am going to write, after the qualities which you have received, which
your education and habits may have depraved, but cannot have entirely
destroyed. There is, I feel, an age at which the individual man would wish to
stop: you are about to inquire about the age at which you would have liked your
whole species to stand still. Discontented with your present state, for reasons
which threaten your unfortunate descendants with still greater discontent, you
will perhaps wish it were in your power to go back; and this feeling should be
a panegyric on your first ancestors, a criticism of your contemporaries, and a
terror to the unfortunates who will come after you.
THE FIRST PART
IMPORTANT as it may be, in order to judge
rightly of the natural state of man, to consider him from his origin,
and to examine him, as it were,
in the embryo of his species; I shall not
follow his organisation through its successive developments, nor
shall I stay to inquire what
his animal system must have been at the
beginning, in order to become at length what it actually is. I shall not
ask whether his long nails were
at first, as Aristotle supposes, only
crooked talons; whether his whole body, like that of a bear, was not
covered with hair; or whether the
fact that he walked upon all fours, with
his looks directed toward the earth, confined to a horizon of a few
paces, did not at once point out
the nature and limits of his ideas. On
this subject I could form none but vague and almost imaginary
conjectures. Comparative anatomy has as
yet made too little progress, and the
observations of naturalists are too uncertain to afford an adequate basis
for any solid reasoning. So
that, without having recourse to the
supernatural information given us on this head, or paying any regard to the
changes which must have taken
place in the internal, as well as the
external, conformation of man, as he applied his limbs to new uses, and fed
himself on new kinds of food,
I shall suppose his conformation to have
been at all times what it appears to us at this day; that he always
walked on two legs, made use
of his hands as we do, directed his looks
over all nature, and measured with his eyes the vast expanse of Heaven.
If we strip this being, thus constituted,
of all the supernatural gifts he may have received, and all the artificial
faculties he can have acquired only by a long process; if we consider him, in a
word, just as he must have come from the hands of nature, we behold in him an
animal weaker than some, and less agile than others; but, taking him all round,
the most advantageously organised of any. I see him satisfying his hunger at
the first oak, and slaking his thirst at the first brook; finding his bed at
the foot of the tree which afforded him a repast; and, with that, all his wants
supplied.
While the earth was left to its natural
fertility and covered with immense forests, whose trees were never mutilated by
the axe, it would present on every side both sustenance and shelter for every
species of animal. Men, dispersed up and down among the rest, would observe and
imitate their industry, and thus attain even to the instinct of the beasts,
with the advantage that, whereas every species of brutes was confined to one
particular instinct, man, who perhaps has not any one peculiar to himself,
would appropriate them all, and live upon most of those different foods which
other animals shared among themselves; and thus would find his subsistence much
more easily than any of the rest.
Accustomed from their infancy to the
inclemencies of the weather and the rigour of the seasons, inured to fatigue,
and forced, naked and unarmed, to defend themselves and their prey from other
ferocious animals, or to escape them by flight, men would acquire a robust and
almost unalterable constitution. The children, bringing with them into the
world the excellent constitution of their parents, and fortifying it by the
very exercises which first produced it, would thus acquire all the vigour of
which the human frame is capable. Nature in this case treats them
exactly as Sparta treated the children of
her citizens: those who come well formed into the world she renders
strong and robust, and all the
rest she destroys; differing in this
respect from our modern communities, in which the State, by
making children a burden to their
parents, kills them indiscriminately
before they are born.
The body of a savage man being the only
instrument he understands, he uses it for various purposes, of which
ours, for want of practice, are
incapable: for our industry deprives us
of that force and agility, which necessity obliges him to acquire. If he
had had an axe, would he have
been able with his naked arm to break so
large a branch from a tree? If he had had a sling, would he have been
able to throw a stone with so
great velocity? If he had had a ladder,
would he have been so nimble in climbing a tree? If he had had a horse,
would he have been himself so
swift of foot? Give civilised man time to
gather all his machines about him, and he will no doubt easily beat the
savage; but if you would see a
still more unequal contest, set them together
naked and unarmed, and you will soon see the advantage of having all our forces
constantly at our
disposal, of being always prepared for
every event, and of carrying one's self, as it were, perpetually whole
and entire about one.
Hobbes contends that man is naturally
intrepid, and is intent only upon attacking and fighting. Another
illustrious philosopher holds the
opposite, and Cumberland and Puffendorf
also affirm that nothing is more timid and fearful than man in the state of
nature; that he is always in a tremble, and ready to fly at the least noise or
the slightest movement. This may be true of things he
does not know; and I do not
doubt his being terrified by every
novelty that presents itself, when he neither knows the physical good or evil he
may expect from it, nor can
make a comparison between his own
strength and the dangers he is about to encounter. Such circumstances, however,
rarely occur in a state of nature, in which all things proceed in a uniform
manner, and the face of the earth is not subject to those sudden and continual
changes which
arise from the passions and caprices of
bodies of men living together. But savage man, living dispersed among
other animals, and finding
himself betimes in a situation to measure
his strength with theirs, soon comes to compare himself with them; and,
perceiving that he surpasses
them more in adroitness than they surpass
him in strength, learns to be no longer afraid of them. Set a bear, or
a wolf, against a robust,
agile, and resolute savage, as they all
are, armed with stones and a good cudgel, and you will see that the
danger will be at least on both
sides, and that, after a few trials of
this kind, wild beasts, which are not fond of attacking each other, will
not be at all ready to attack
man, whom they will have found to be as
wild and ferocious as themselves. With regard to such animals
as have really more strength
than man has adroitness, he is in the
same situation as all weaker animals, which notwithstanding are still
able to subsist; except indeed
that he has the advantage that, being
equally swift of foot, and finding an almost certain place of refuge in
every tree, he is at liberty to
take or leave it at every encounter, and
thus to fight or fly, as he chooses. Add to this that it does not appear
that any animal naturally
makes war on man, except in case of
self-defence or excessive hunger, or betrays any of those violent antipathies,
which seem to indicate that
one species is intended by nature for the
food of another.
This is doubtless why negroes and savages
are so little afraid of the wild beasts they may meet in the woods.
The Caraibs of Venezuela among others live in this respect in absolute security
and without the smallest inconvenience. Though they are
almost naked, Francis Corréal
tells us, they expose themselves freely
in the woods, armed only with bows and arrows; but no one has ever
heard of one of them being devoured by wild beasts.
But man has other enemies more
formidable, against which he is not provided with such means of defence:
these are the natural infirmities
of infancy, old age, and illness of every
kind, melancholy proofs of our weakness, of which the two first are
common to all animals, and the last
belongs chiefly to man in a state of
society. With regard to infancy, it is observable that the mother, carrying
her child always with her, can
nurse it with much greater ease than the
females of many other animals, which are forced to be perpetually going
and coming, with great fatigue,
one way to find subsistence, and another
to suckle or feed their young. It is true that if the woman happens to
perish, the infant is in great
danger of perishing with her; but this
risk is common to many other species of animals, whose young take a
long time before they are able to
provide for themselves. And if our
infancy is longer than theirs, our lives are longer in proportion; so that
all things are in this respect
fairly equal; though there are other
rules to be considered regarding the duration of the first period of life,
and the number of young, which
do not affect the present subject. In old
age, when men are less active and perspire little, the need for food
diminishes with the ability to
provide it. As the savage state also
protects them from gout and rheumatism, and old age is, of all ills,
that which human aid can least
alleviate, they cease to be, without
others perceiving that they are no more, and almost without perceiving it
themselves.
With respect to sickness, I shall not
repeat the vain and false declamations which most healthy people
pronounce against medicine; but I shall ask if any solid observations have been
made from which it may be justly concluded that, in the countries where the art
of medicine is most neglected, the mean duration of man's life is less than in
those where it is most cultivated. How indeed
can this be the case, if we
bring on ourselves more diseases than
medicine can furnish remedies? The great inequality in manner of living, the
extreme idleness of some, and the excessive labour of others, the easiness of
exciting and gratifying our sensual appetites, the too exquisite
foods of the wealthy which
overheat and fill them with indigestion,
and, on the other hand, the unwholesome food of the poor, often, bad
as it is, insufficient for
their needs, which induces them, when
opportunity offers, to eat voraciously and overcharge their
stomachs; all these, together with
sitting up late, and excesses of every
kind, immoderate transports of every passion, fatigue, mental
exhaustion, the innumerable pains and
anxieties inseparable from every
condition of life, by which the mind of man is incessantly tormented; these are
too fatal proofs that the
greater part of our ills are of our own
making, and that we might have avoided them nearly all by adhering to
that simple, uniform and solitary
manner of life which nature prescribed.
If she destined man to be healthy, I venture to declare that a
state of reflection is a state
contrary to nature, and that a thinking
man is a depraved animal. When we think of the good constitution of the
savages, at least of those whom
we have not ruined with our spirituous
liquors, and reflect that they are troubled with hardly any disorders,
save wounds and old age, we are
tempted to believe that, in following the
history of civil society, we shall be telling also that of human
sickness. Such, at least, was the
opinion of Plato, who inferred from
certain remedies prescribed, or approved, by Podalirius and Machaon at
the siege of Troy, that several
sicknesses which these remedies gave rise
to in his time, were not then known to mankind: and Celsus tells us
that diet, which is now so
necessary, was first invented by
Hippocrates.
Being subject therefore to so few causes
of sickness, man, in the state of nature, can have no need of remedies,
and still less of physicians:
nor is the human race in this respect
worse off than other animals, and it is easy to learn from hunters whether
they meet with many infirm
animals in the course of the chase. It is
certain they frequently meet with such as carry the marks of having
been considerably wounded, with
many that have had bones or even limbs
broken, yet have been healed without any other surgical assistance
than that of time, or any other
regimen than that of their ordinary life.
At the same time their cures seem not to have been less perfect, for
their not having been tortured
by incisions, poisoned with drugs, or
wasted by fasting. In short, however useful medicine, properly
administered, may be among us, it is
certain that, if the savage, when he is
sick and left to himself, has nothing to hope but from nature, he has,
on the other hand, nothing to
fear but from his disease; which renders
his situation often preferable to our own.
We should beware, therefore, of
confounding the savage man with the men we have daily before our eyes. Nature
treats all the animals left to her care with a predilection that seems to show
how jealous she is of that right. The horse, the cat, the bull, and
even the ass are generally of
greater stature, and always more robust,
and have more vigour, strength and courage, when they run wild in the
forests than when bred in the
stall. By becoming domesticated, they
lose half these advantages; and it seems as if all our care to feed and treat
them well serves only to
deprave them. It is thus with man also:
as he becomes sociable and a slave, he grows weak, timid and servile;
his effeminate way of life
totally enervates his strength and
courage. To this it may be added that there is still a greater difference
between savage and civilised man,
than between wild and tame beasts: for
men and brutes having been treated alike by nature, the several
conveniences in which men indulge
themselves still more than they do their
beasts, are so many additional causes of their deeper degeneracy.
It is not therefore so great a misfortune
to these primitive men, nor so great an obstacle to their preservation,
that they go naked, have no
dwellings and lack all the superfluities
which we think so necessary. If their skins are not covered with hair,
they have no need of such
covering in warm climates; and, in cold
countries, they soon learn to appropriate the skins of the beasts they
have overcome. If they have but
two legs to run with, they have two arms
to defend themselves with, and provide for their wants. Their children
are slowly and with difficulty
taught to walk; but their mothers are
able to carry them with ease; an advantage which other animals lack, as
the mother, if pursued, is forced
either to abandon her young, or to
regulate her pace by theirs. Unless, in short, we suppose a singular and
fortuitous concurrence of
circumstances of which I shall speak
later, and which would be unlikely to exist, it is plain in every state of
the case, that the man who first
made himself clothes or a dwelling was
furnishing himself with things
not at all necessary; for he had till
then done without them, and there
is no reason why he should not have been
able to put up in manhood with the same kind of life as had been his in
infancy.
Solitary, indolent, and perpetually
accompanied by danger, the savage cannot but be fond of sleep; his sleep
too must be light, like that of
the animals, which think but little and
may be said to slumber all the time they do not think. Self-preservation
being his chief and almost
sole concern, he must exercise most those
faculties which are most concerned with attack or defence, either
for overcoming his prey, or for
preventing him from becoming the prey of
other animals. On the other hand, those organs which are perfected
only by softness and sensuality
will remain in a gross and imperfect
state, incompatible with any sort of delicacy; so that, his senses being
divided on this head, his touch
and taste will be extremely coarse, his
sight, hearing and smell exceedingly fine and subtle. Such in
general is the animal condition,
and such, according to the narratives of
travellers, is that of most savage nations. It is therefore no matter
for surprise that the
Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope
distinguish ships at sea, with the naked eye, at as great a distance as the
Dutch can do with their
telescopes; or that the savages of
America should trace the Spaniards, by their smell, as well as the best dogs
could have done; or that these
barbarous peoples feel no pain in going
naked, or that they use large quantities of piemento with their food,
and drink the strongest European
liquors like water.
Hitherto I have considered merely the
physical man; let us now take a view of him on his metaphysical and moral
side.
I see nothing in any animal but an
ingenious machine, to which nature hath given senses to wind itself up, and
to guard itself, to a certain
degree, against anything that might tend
to disorder or destroy it. I perceive exactly the same things in the
human machine, with this
difference, that in the operations of the
brute, nature is the sole
character as a free agent. The one chooses
and refuses by instinct, the other from an act of free-will: hence the
brute cannot deviate from the
rule prescribed to it, even when it would
be advantageous for it to do so; and, on the contrary, man frequently
deviates from such rules to his
own prejudice. Thus a pigeon would be
starved to death by the side of a dish of the choicest meats, and a cat on
a heap of fruit or grain;
though it is certain that either might
find nourishment in the foods which it thus rejects with disdain, did
it think of trying them. Hence
it is that dissolute men run into
excesses which bring on fevers and death; because the mind depraves the
senses, and the will continues to
speak when nature is silent.
Every animal has ideas, since it has
senses; it even combines those ideas in a certain degree; and it is only
in degree that man differs, in
this respect, from the brute. Some
philosophers have even maintained that there is a greater difference
between one man and another than
between some men and some beasts. It is
not, therefore, so much the understanding that constitutes the
specific difference between the man
and the brute, as the human quality of
free-agency. Nature lays her commands on every animal, and the brute
obeys her voice. Man receives
the same impulsion, but at the same time
knows himself at liberty to acquiesce or resist: and it is
particularly in his consciousness of this
liberty that the spirituality of his soul
is displayed. For physics may explain, 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 feeling of this power, nothing is to be found but acts
which are purely spiritual and wholly inexplicable by the laws of mechanism.
However, even if the difficulties
attending all these questions should still leave room for difference in this
respect between men and brutes,
there is another very specific quality
which distinguishes them, and which will admit of no dispute. This is
the faculty of self-improvement,
which, by the help of circumstances,
gradually develops all the rest of our faculties, and is inherent in the
species as in the individual:
whereas a brute is, at the end of a few
months, all he will ever be during his whole life, and his species,
at the end of a thousand years,
exactly what it was the first year of
that thousand. Why is man alone liable to grow into a dotard? Is it not
because he returns, in this, to
his primitive state; and that, while the
brute, which has acquired nothing and has therefore nothing to
lose, still retains the force of
instinct, man, who loses, by age or
accident, all that his perfectibility had enabled him to gain, falls by this
means lower than the brutes themselves? It would be melancholy, were we forced
to admit
human misfortunes; that it is this which,
in time, draws man out of his original state, in which he would have
spent his days insensibly in
peace and innocence; that it is this
faculty, which, successively producing in different ages his
discoveries and his errors, his vices
and his virtues, makes him at length a
tyrant both over himself and over nature.[1] It would be shocking to be
obliged to regard as a benefactor
the man who first suggested to the
Oroonoko Indians the use of the boards they apply to the temples of their
children, which secure to them
some part at least of their imbecility
and original happiness.
Savage man, left by nature solely to the
direction of instinct, or rather indemnified for what he may lack by faculties
capable at first of supplying its place, and afterwards of raising him much
above it, must accordingly begin with purely animal functions: thus seeing and
feeling must be his first condition, which would be common to him and all other
animals. To will, and not to will, to desire and to fear, must be the first,
and almost the only operations of his soul, till new circumstances occasion new
developments of his faculties.
Whatever moralists may hold, the human
understanding is greatly indebted to the passions, which, it is universally
allowed, are also much
indebted to the understanding. It is by
the activity of the passions that our reason is improved; for we
desire knowledge only because we
wish to enjoy; and it is impossible to
conceive any reason why a person who has neither fears nor desires should
give himself the trouble of
reasoning. The passions, again, originate
in our wants, and their progress depends on that of our
knowledge; for we cannot desire or fear
anything, except from the idea we have of
it, or from the simple impulse of nature. Now savage man, being
destitute of every species of
intelligence, can have no passions save
those of the latter kind: his desires never go beyond his physical
wants. The only goods he recognises
in the universe are food, a female, and
sleep: the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain, and not
death: for no animal can know
what it is to die; the knowledge of death
and its terrors being one of the first acquisitions made by man in
departing from an animal state.
It would be easy, were it necessary, to
support this opinion by facts, and to show that, in all the nations of
the world, the progress of the
understanding has been exactly
proportionate to the wants which the peoples had received from nature, or been
subjected to by circumstances,
and in consequence to the passions that
induced them to provide for those necessities. I might instance the
arts, rising up in Egypt and
expanding with the inundation of the Nile.
I might follow their progress into Greece, where they took root afresh,
grew up and lowered to the
skies, among the rocks and sands of
Attica, without being able to germinate on the fertile banks of the
Eurotas: I might observe that in
general, the people of the North are more
industrious than those of the South, because they cannot get on so well
without being so: as if nature
wanted to equalise matters by giving
their understandings the fertility she had refused to their soil.
But who does not see, without recurring
to the uncertain testimony of history, that everything seems to remove
from savage man both the
temptation and the means of changing his
condition? His imagination paints no pictures; his heart makes no
demands on him. His few wants are so readily supplied, and he is so far from
having the knowledge which is needful to make him want more, that he can have
neither foresight nor
curiosity. The face of nature becomes
indifferent to him as it grows familiar. He sees in it always the same order,
the same successions: he
has not understanding enough to wonder at
the greatest miracles; nor is it in his mind that we can expect to find
that philosophy man needs, if
he is to know how to notice for once what
he sees every day. His soul, which nothing disturbs, is wholly wrapped
up in the feeling of its
present existence, without any idea of
the future, however near at hand; while his projects, as limited as his
views, hardly extend to the close
of day. Such, even at present, is the
extent of the native Caribbean's foresight: he will improvidently sell you
his cotton-bed in the morning,
and come crying in the evening to buy it
again, not having foreseen he would want it again the next night.
The more we reflect on this subject, the
greater appears the distance between pure sensation and the most
simple knowledge: it is impossible
indeed to conceive how a man, by his own
powers alone, without the aid of communication and the spur of
necessity, could have bridged so great a gap. How many ages may have elapsed
before mankind were in a position to behold any other fire than that of the
heavens. What a multiplicity of chances must have happened to teach them the
commonest uses of that element! How often must they have let it out before they
acquired the art of reproducing it? and how often may not such a secret have
died with him who had discovered it? What shall we say of agriculture, an art
which requires so much labour and foresight, which is so dependent on others
that it is plain it could only be practised in a society which had at least
begun, and which does not serve so much to draw the means of subsistence from
the earth -- for these it would produce of itself -- but to compel it to
produce what is most to our taste? But let us suppose that men had so
multiplied that the natural produce of the earth was no longer sufficient for
their support; a supposition, by the way, which would prove such a life to be
very advantageous for the human race; let us suppose that, without forges or
workshops, the instruments of husbandry had dropped from the sky into the hands
of savages; that they had overcome their natural aversion to continual labour;
that they had learnt so much foresight for their needs; that they had divined
how to cultivate the earth, to sow grain and plant trees; that they had
discovered the arts of grinding corn, and of setting the grape to ferment --
all being things that must have been taught them by the gods, since it is not
to be conceived how they could discover them for themselves -- yet after all
this, what man among them would be so absurd as to take the trouble of
cultivating a field, which might be stripped of its crop by the first comer,
man or beast, that might take a liking to it; and how should each of them
resolve to pass his life in wearisome labour, when, the more necessary to him
the reward of his labour might be, the surer he would be of not getting it? In
a word, how could such a situation induce men to cultivate the earth, till it
was regularly parcelled out among them; that is to say, till the state of
nature had been abolished?
Were we to suppose savage man as trained
in the art of thinking as philosophers make him; were we, like
them, to suppose him a very
philosopher capable of investigating the
sublimest truths, and of forming, by highly abstract chains of
reasoning, maxims of reason and
justice, deduced from the love of order
in general, or the known will of his Creator; in a word, were we to
suppose him as intelligent and
enlightened, as he must have been, and is
in fact found to have been, dull and stupid, what advantage would
accrue to the species, from all
such metaphysics, which could not be
communicated by one to another, but must end with him who made them? What
progress could be made by mankind, while dispersed in the woods among other
animals? and how far could men improve or mutually enlighten one another, when,
having no fixed habitation, and no need of one another's assistance, the same
persons hardly met twice in their lives, and perhaps then, without knowing one
another or speaking together?
Let it be considered how many ideas we
owe to the use of speech; how far grammar exercises the understanding and
facilitates its operations. Let us reflect on the inconceivable pains and
the infinite space of time that the first invention of languages
must have cost. To these
reflections add what preceded, and then
judge how many thousand ages must have elapsed in the successive
development in the human mind of
those operations of which it is capable.
I shall here take the liberty for a
moment, of considering the difficulties of the origin of languages,
on which subject I might
content myself with a simple repetition
of the Abbé Condillac's investigations, as they fully confirm my
system, and perhaps even first
suggested it. But it is plain, from the
manner in which this philosopher solves the difficulties he himself
raises, concerning the origin of
arbitrary signs, that he assumes what I
question, viz., that a kind of society must already have existed among
the first inventors of language.
While I refer, therefore, to his
observations on this head, I think it right to give my own, in order to exhibit
the same difficulties in a
light adapted to my subject. The first
which presents itself is to conceive how language can have become
necessary; for as there was no
communication among men and no need for
any, we can neither conceive the necessity of this invention, nor the
possibility of it, if it was not somehow indispensable. I might affirm, with
many others, that languages arose in the domestic intercourse between parents
and their children. But this expedient would not obviate the difficulty, and
would besides involve the blunder made by those who, in reasoning on the state
of nature, always import into it ideas gathered in a state of society. Thus
they constantly consider families as living together under one roof, and the
individuals of each as observing among themselves a union as intimate and
permanent as that which exists among us, where so many common interests unite
them: whereas, in this primitive state, men had neither houses, nor huts, nor
any kind of property whatever; every one lived where he could, seldom for more
than a single night; the sexes united without design, as accident, opportunity
or inclination brought them together, nor had they any great need of words to
communicate their designs to each other; and they parted with the same
indifference. The mother gave suck to her children at first for her own sake;
and afterwards, when habit had made them dear, for theirs: but as soon as they
were strong enough to go in search of their own food, they forsook her of their
own accord; and, as they had hardly any other method of not losing one another
than that of remaining continually within sight, they soon became quite
incapable of recognising one another when they happened to meet again. It is
farther to be observed that the child, having all his wants to explain, and of
course more to say to his mother than the mother could have to say to him, must
have borne the brunt of the task of invention, and the language he used would
be of his own device, so that the number of languages would be equal to that of
the individuals speaking them, and the
variety would be increased by the vagabond and roving life they led, which
would not give time for any idiom to become constant. For to say that
the mother dictated to her
child the words he was to use in asking
her for one thing or another, is an explanation of how languages already
formed are taught, but by no
means explains how languages were
originally formed.
We will suppose, however, that this first
difficulty is obviated. Let us for a moment then take ourselves as being
on this side of the vast space
which must lie between a pure state of
nature and that in which languages had become necessary, and,
admitting their necessity, let us
inquire how they could first be
established. Here we have a new and worse difficulty to grapple with; for if
men need speech to learn to
think, they must have stood in much
greater need of the art of thinking, to be able to invent that of speaking.
And though we might conceive how the articulate sounds of the voice came to be
taken as the conventional interpreters of our ideas, it would still remain for
us to inquire what could have been the interpreters of this convention for
those ideas, which, answering to no sensible objects, could not be indicated
either by gesture or voice; so that we can hardly form any tolerable
conjectures about the origin of this art of communicating our thoughts and
establishing a correspondence between minds: an art so sublime, that far
distant as it is from its origin, philosophers still behold it at such an
immeasurable distance from perfection, that there is none rash enough to affirm
it will ever reach it, even though the revolutions time necessarily produces
were suspended in its favour, though prejudice should be banished from our
academies or condemned to silence, and those learned societies should devote
themselves uninterruptedly for whole ages to this thorny question.
The first language of mankind, the most
universal and vivid, in a word the only language man needed, before he
had occasion to exert his
eloquence to persuade assembled
multitudes, was the simple cry of nature. But as this was excited only by a
sort of instinct on urgent
occasions, to implore assistance in case
of danger, or relief in case of suffering, it could be of little use in
the ordinary course of life, in
which more moderate feelings prevail.
When the ideas of men began to expand and multiply, and closer
communication took place among them,
they strove to invent more numerous signs
and a more copious language. They multiplied the inflections of the
voice, and added gestures, which
are in their own nature more expressive,
and depend less for their meaning on a prior determination. Visible
and movable objects were
therefore expressed by gestures, and
audible ones by imitative sounds: but, as hardly anything can be indicated
by gestures, except objects
actually present or easily described, and
visible actions; as they are not universally useful -- for darkness or
the interposition of a material
object destroys their efficacy -- and as
besides they rather request than secure our attention; men at length
bethought themselves of substituting
for them the articulate sounds of the
voice, which, without bearing the same relation to any particular ideas,
are better calculated to express
them all, as conventional signs. Such an
institution could only be made by common consent, and must have been effected
in a manner not very easy for men whose gross organs had not been accustomed to
any such exercise. It is also in itself still more difficult to conceive, since
such a
common agreement must have had motives,
and speech seems to have been highly necessary to establish the use of it.
It is reasonable to suppose that the
words first made use of by mankind had a much more extensive signification
than those used in languages
already formed, and that ignorant as they
were of the division of discourse into its constituent parts,
they at first gave every single
word the sense of a whole proposition.
When they began to distinguish subject and attribute, and noun and verb,
which was itself no common
effort of genius, substantives were first
only so many proper names; the present infinitive was the only tense of
verbs; and the very idea of
adjectives must have been developed with
great difficulty; for every adjective is an abstract idea, and
abstractions are painful and
unnatural operations.
Every object at first received a
particular name without regard to genus or species, which these primitive
originators were not in a position to
distinguish; every individual presented
itself to their minds in isolation, as they are in the picture of
nature. If one oak was called
A, another was called B; for the
primitive idea of two things is that they are not the same, and it often takes
a long time for what they have
in common to be seen: so that, the
narrower the limits of their knowledge of things, the more copious
their dictionary must have been.
The difficulty of using such a vocabulary
could not be easily removed; for, to arrange beings under common and
generic denominations, it became necessary to know their distinguishing
properties: the need arose for observation and definition, that is to say, for
natural history and
metaphysics of a far more developed kind
than men can at that time have possessed.
Add to this, that general ideas cannot be
introduced into the mind without the assistance of words, nor can
the understanding seize them
except by means of propositions. This is
one of the reasons why animals cannot form such ideas, or ever acquire
that capacity for
self-improvement which depends on them.
When a monkey goes from one nut to another, are we to conceive that he
entertains any general idea of that kind of fruit, and compares its archetype
with the two individual nuts? Assuredly he does not; but the
sight of one of these nuts recalls
to his memory the sensations which he
received from the other, and his eyes, being modified after a certain
manner, give information to the
palate of the modification it is about to
receive. Every general idea is purely intellectual; if the imagination
meddles with it ever so little,
the idea immediately becomes particular.
If you endeavour to trace in your mind the image of a tree in general,
you never attain to your end.
In spite of all you can do, you will have
to see it as great or little, bare or leafy, light or dark, and were
you capable of seeing nothing in
it but what is common to all trees, it
would no longer be like a tree at all. Purely abstract beings are
perceivable in the same manner, or are
only conceivable by the help of language.
The definition of a triangle alone gives you a true idea of it: the
moment you imagine a triangle in
your mind, it is some particular triangle
and not another, and you cannot avoid giving it sensible lines and
a coloured area. We must then
make use of propositions and of language
in order to form general ideas. For no sooner does the imagination cease
to operate than the
understanding proceeds only by the help
of words. If then the first inventors of speech could give names only
to ideas they already had, it
follows that the first substantives could
be nothing more than proper names.
But when our new grammarians, by means of
which I have no conception, began to extend their ideas and generalise their
terms, the ignorance of the inventors must have confined this method within
very narrow limits; and, as they had at first gone too far in multiplying the
names of individuals, from ignorance of their genus and species, they made
afterwards too few of these, from not having considered beings in all their
specific differences. It would indeed have needed more knowledge and experience
than they could have, and more pains and inquiry than they would have bestowed,
to carry these distinctions to their proper length. If, even to-day, we are
continually discovering new species, which have hitherto escaped observation,
let us reflect how many of them must have escaped men who judged things merely
from their first appearance! It is superfluous to add that the primitive
classes and the most general notions must necessarily have escaped their notice
also. How, for instance, could they have understood or thought of the words
matter, spirit, substance, mode, figure, motion, when even our philosophers,
who have so long been making use of them, have themselves the greatest
difficulty in understanding them; and when, the ideas attached to them being
purely metaphysical, there are no models of them to be found in nature?
But I stop at this point, and ask my
judges to suspend their reading a while, to consider, after the invention
of physical substantives, which
is the easiest part of language to
invent, that there is still a great way to go, before the thoughts of men
will have found perfect expression
and constant form, such as would answer the
purposes of public speaking, and produce their effect on society. I beg of them
to consider how much time must have been spent, and how much knowledge needed,
to find out numbers, abstract terms, aorists and all the tenses of verbs,
particles, syntax, the method of connecting propositions, the forms of
reasoning, and all the logic of speech. For myself, I am so aghast at the
increasing difficulties which present themselves, and so well convinced of the
almost demonstrable impossibility that languages should owe their original
institution to merely human means, that I leave, to any one who will undertake
it, the discussion of the difficult problem, which was most necessary, the
existence of society to the invention of language, or the invention of language
to the establishment of society. . . .
It is then certain that compassion is a
natural feeling, which, by moderating the violence of love of self
in each individual, contributes
to the preservation of the whole species.
It is this compassion that hurries us without reflection to the
relief of those who are in
distress: it is this which in a state of
nature supplies the place of laws, morals and virtues, with the
advantage that none are tempted to
disobey its gentle voice: it is this
which will always prevent a sturdy savage from robbing a weak child or a
feeble old man of the sustenance
they may have with pain and difficulty
acquired, if he sees a possibility of providing for himself by
other means: it is this which,
instead of inculcating that sublime maxim
of rational justice. Do to others as you would have them do unto
you, inspires all men with that
other maxim of natural goodness, much
less perfect indeed, but perhaps more useful; Do good to yourself with as
little evil as possible to
others. In a word, it is rather in this
natural feeling than in any subtle arguments that we must look for
the cause of that repugnance,
which every man would experience in doing
evil, even independently of the maxims of education. Although it
might belong to Socrates and other minds of the like craft to acquire virtue
by reason, the human race would long since have ceased to be, had
its preservation depended only
on the reasonings of the individuals
composing it.
With passions so little active, and so
good a curb, men, being rather wild than wicked, and more intent to
guard themselves against the
mischief that might be done them, than to
do mischief to others, were by no means subject to very perilous
dissensions. They maintained no kind of intercourse with one another, and were
consequently strangers to vanity, deference, esteem and contempt;
they had not the least idea of
meum and tuum, and no true conception of
justice; they looked upon every violence to which they were subjected, rather
as an injury that might easily be repaired than as a crime that ought to be
punished; and they never thought of taking revenge, unless perhaps mechanically
and on the spot, as a dog will sometimes bite the stone which is thrown at him.
Their quarrels therefore would seldom have very bloody consequences; for the
subject of them would be merely the question of subsistence. But I am aware of
one greater danger, which remains to be noticed.
Of the passions that stir the heart of
man, there is one which makes the sexes necessary to each other, and is
extremely ardent and impetuous; a
terrible passion that braves danger,
surmounts all obstacles, and in its transports seems calculated to bring
destruction on the human race which it is really destined to preserve. What
must become of men who are left to this brutal and boundless rage, without
modesty, without shame, and daily upholding their amours at the price of their
blood?
It must, in the first place, be allowed
that, the more violent the passions are, the more are laws necessary
to keep them under restraint.
But, setting aside the inadequacy of laws
to effect this purpose, which is evident from the crimes and disorders
to which these passions daily
give rise among us, we should do well to
inquire if these evils did not spring up with the laws themselves; for
in this case, even if the laws
were capable of repressing such evils, it
is the least that could be expected from them, that they should
check a mischief which would not
have arisen without them.
Let us begin by distinguishing between
the physical and moral ingredients in the feeling of love. The
physical part of love is that
general desire which urges the sexes to
union with each other. The moral part is that which determines and fixes
this desire exclusively upon one
particular object; or at least gives it a
greater degree of energy toward the object thus preferred. It is
easy to see that the moral part
of love is a factitious feeling, born of
social usage, and enhanced by the women with much care and cleverness,
to establish their empire, and
put in power the sex which ought to obey.
This feeling, being founded on certain ideas of beauty and merit which a savage
is not in a position to
acquire, and on comparisons which he is
incapable of making, must be for him almost non-existent; for, as his mind
cannot form abstract ideas of proportion and regularity, so his heart is not
susceptible of the feelings of love and admiration, which
are even insensibly produced by
the application of these ideas. He follows
solely the character nature has implanted in him, and not tastes
which he could never have acquired;
so that every woman equally answers his
purpose.
Men in a state of nature being confined
merely to what is physical in love, and fortunate enough to be ignorant
of those excellences, which
whet the appetite while they increase the
difficulty of gratifying it, must be subject to fewer and less violent
fits of passion, and
consequently fall into fewer and less
violent disputes. The imagination, which causes such ravages among us, never
speaks to the heart of
savages, who quietly await the impulses
of nature, yield to them involuntarily, with more pleasure than
ardour, and, their wants once
satisfied, lose the desire. It is
therefore incontestable that love, as well as all other passions, must have
acquired in society that glowing
impetuosity, which makes it so often
fatal to mankind. And it is the more absurd to represent savages as
continually cutting one another's
throats to indulge their brutality, because
this opinion is directly contrary to experience; the Caribbeans,
who have as yet least of all
deviated from the state of nature, being
in fact the most peaceable of people in their amours, and the least
subject to jealousy, though they
live in a hot climate which seems always
to inflame the passions.
With regard to the inferences that might
be drawn, in the case of several species of animals, the males of
which fill our poultry-yards
with blood and slaughter, or in spring
make the forests resound with their quarrels over their females; we
must begin by excluding all those
species, in which nature has plainly
established, in the comparative power of the sexes, relations different
from those which exist among us:
thus we can base no conclusion about men
on the habits of fighting cocks. In those species where the
proportion is better observed, these
battles must be entirely due to the
scarcity of females in comparison with males; or, what amounts to the same
thing, to the intervals during
which the female constantly refuses the
advances of the male: for if each female admits the male but during
two months in the year, it is the
same as if the number of females were
five-sixths less. Now, neither of these two cases is applicable to the
human species, in which the number
of females usually exceeds that of males,
and among whom it has never been observed, even among savages, that
the females have, like those of
other animals, their stated times of
passion and indifference. Moreover, in several of these species, the
individuals all take fire at once, and
there comes a fearful moment of universal
passion, tumult and disorder among them; a scene which is never beheld
in the human species, whose
love is not thus seasonal. We must not
then conclude from the combats of such animals for the enjoyment of the
females, that the case would be
the same with mankind in a state of
nature: and, even if we drew such a conclusion, we see that such contests do
not exterminate other kinds of
animals, and we have no reason to think
they would be more fatal to ours. It is indeed clear that they would
do still less mischief than is
the case in a state of society;
especially in those countries in which, morals being still held in some repute,
the jealousy of lovers and the
vengeance of husbands are the daily cause
of duels, murders, and even worse crimes; where the obligation of
eternal fidelity only occasions
adultery, and the very laws of honour and
continence necessarily increase debauchery and lead to the
multiplication of abortions.
Let us conclude then that man in a state
of nature, wandering up and down the forests, without industry,
without speech, and without home, an equal stranger to war and to all ties,
neither standing in need of his fellow-creatures nor having any desire to
hurt them, and perhaps even
not distinguishing them one from another;
let us conclude that, being self-sufficient and subject to so few
passions, he could have no
feelings or knowledge but such as befitted
his situation; that he felt only his actual necessities, and
disregarded everything he did not think
himself immediately concerned to notice,
and that his understanding made no greater progress than his vanity. If by
accident he made any
discovery, he was the less able to
communicate it to others, as he did not know even his own children. Every art
would necessarily perish with
its inventor, where there was no kind of
education among men, and generations succeeded generations without
the least advance; when, all
setting out from the same point,
centuries must have elapsed in the barbarism of the first ages; when the
race was already old, and man
remained a child. . . .
THE SECOND PART
THE first man who, having enclosed a
piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people
simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how
many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not
any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch,
and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are
undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and
the earth itself to nobody." But there is great probability that things had
then already come to such a pitch, that they could no longer continue as they
were; for the idea of property depends on many prior ideas, which could only be
acquired successively, and cannot have been formed all at once in the human
mind. Mankind must have made very considerable progress, and acquired
considerable knowledge and industry which they must also have transmitted and
increased from age to age, before they arrived at this last point of the state
of nature. Let us then go farther back, and endeavour to unify under a single
point of view that slow succession of events and discoveries in the most
natural order.
Man's first feeling was that of his own
existence, and his first care that of self-preservation. The produce of the
earth furnished him with all he needed, and instinct told him how to use it.
Hunger and other appetites made him at various times experience various modes
of existence; and among these was one which urged him to propagate his species
-- a blind propensity that, having nothing to do with the heart, produced a
merely animal act. The want once gratified, the two sexes knew each other no
more; and even the offspring was nothing to its mother, as soon as it could do
without her.
Such was the condition of infant man; the
life of an animal limited at first to mere sensations, and hardly profiting by
the gifts nature bestowed on him, much less capable of entertaining a thought
of forcing anything from her. But difficulties soon presented themselves, and
it became necessary to learn how to surmount them: the height of the trees,
which prevented him from gathering their fruits, the competition of other
animals desirous of the same fruits, and the ferocity of those who needed them
for their own preservation, all obliged him to apply himself to bodily
exercises. He had to be active, swift of foot, and vigorous in fight. Natural weapons, stones and
sticks, were easily found: he learnt
to surmount the obstacles of nature, to
contend in case of necessity with other animals, and to dispute for the
means of subsistence even
with other men, or to indemnify himself
for what he was forced to give up to a stronger.
In proportion as the human race grew more
numerous, men's cares increased. The difference of soils,
climates and seasons, must have
introduced some differences into their
manner of living. Barren years, long and sharp winters, scorching summers
which parched the fruits of
the earth, must have demanded a new
industry. On the seashore and the banks of rivers, they invented the hook
and line, and became fishermen
and eaters of fish. In the forests they
made bows and arrows, and became huntsmen and warriors. In cold countries
they clothed themselves with
the skins of the beasts they had slain.
The lightning, a volcano, or some lucky chance acquainted them with fire, a new
resource against the rigours of winter: they next learned how to preserve this
element, then how to reproduce it, and finally how to
prepare with it the flesh of
animals which before they had eaten raw.
This repeated relevance of various beings
to himself, and one to another, would naturally give rise in the
human mind to the perceptions
of certain relations between them. Thus
the relations which we denote by the terms, great, small, strong, weak,
swift, slow, fearful, bold, and
the like, almost insensibly compared at
need, must have at length produced in him a kind of reflection, or
rather a mechanical prudence,
which would indicate to him the
precautions most necessary to his security.
The new intelligence which resulted from
this development increased his superiority over other animals, by making
him sensible of it. He would
now endeavour, therefore, to ensnare
them, would play them a thousand tricks, and though many of them might
surpass him in swiftness or in
strength, would in time become the master
of some and the scourge of others. Thus, the first time he looked
into himself, he felt the first
emotion of pride; and, at a time when he
scarce knew how to distinguish the different orders of beings, by
looking upon his species as of the
highest order, he prepared the way for
assuming pre-eminence as an individual.
Other men, it is true, were not then to
him what they now are to us, and he had no greater intercourse with them
than with other animals; yet
they were not neglected in his
observations. The conformities, which he would in time discover between them, and
between himself and his female, led him to judge of others which were not then
perceptible; and finding that they all behaved as he himself would have done in
like
circumstances, he naturally inferred that
their manner of thinking and acting was altogether in conformity with
his own. This important truth,
once deeply impressed on his mind, must
have induced him, from an intuitive feeling more certain and much
more rapid than any kind of
reasoning, to pursue the rules of
conduct, which he had best observe towards them, for his own security and
advantage.
Taught by experience that the love of
well-being is the sole motive of human actions, he found himself in a
position to distinguish the few
cases, in which mutual interest might
justify him in relying upon the assistance of his fellows; and also the
still fewer cases in which a
conflict of interests might give cause to
suspect them. In the former case, he joined in the same herd with
them, or at most in some kind of
loose association, that laid no restraint
on its members, and lasted no longer than the transitory occasion that
formed it. In the latter case,
every one sought his own private
advantage, either by open force, if he thought himself strong enough, or by
address and cunning, if he felt
himself the weaker.
In this manner, men may have insensibly
acquired some gross ideas of mutual undertakings, and of the
advantages of fulfilling them: that is,
just so far as their present and apparent
interest was concerned: for they were perfect strangers to foresight,
and were so far from troubling
themselves about the distant future, that
they hardly thought of the morrow. If a deer was to be taken, every
one saw that, in order to
succeed, he must abide faithfully by his
post: but if a hare happened to come within the reach of any one of them,
it is not to be doubted that
he pursued it without scruple, and,
having seized his prey, cared very little, if by so doing he caused his
companions to miss theirs.
It is easy to understand that such
intercourse would not require a language much more refined than that of
rooks or monkeys, who associate together for much the same purpose.
Inarticulate cries, plenty of gestures and some imitative sounds, must have
been for a long time the universal language; and by the addition, in every
country, of some conventional articulate sounds (of which,
as I have already intimated,
the first institution is not too easy to
explain) particular languages were produced; but these were rude and
imperfect, and nearly such as are
now to be found among some savage
nations.
Hurried on by the rapidity of time, by
the abundance of things I have to say, and by the almost insensible
progress of things in their beginnings, I pass over in an instant a multitude
of ages; for the slower the events were in their succession, the more rapidly
may they be described.
These first advances enabled men to make
others with greater rapidity. In proportion as they grew enlightened,
they grew industrious. They
ceased to fall asleep under the first
tree, or in the first cave that afforded them shelter; they invented
several kinds of implements of hard
and sharp stones, which they used to dig
up the earth, and to cut wood; they then made huts out of branches, and
afterwards learnt to plaster
them over with mud and clay. This was the
epoch of a first revolution, which established and distinguished
families, and introduced a kind of
property, in itself the source of a
thousand quarrels and conflicts. As, however, the strongest were probably the
first to build themselves huts
which they felt themselves able to
defend, it may be concluded that the weak found it much easier and safer to
imitate, than to attempt to
dislodge them: and of those who were once
provided with huts, none could have any inducement to appropriate that of his
neighbour; not indeed so much because it did not belong to him, as because it
could be of no use, and he could not make himself master of it without exposing
himself to a desperate battle with the family which occupied it.
The first expansions of the human heart
were the effects of a novel situation, which united husbands and wives,
fathers and children, under
one roof. The habit of living together
soon gave rise to the finest feelings known to humanity, conjugal love
and paternal affection. Every
family became a little society, the more
united because liberty and reciprocal attachment were the only bonds
of its union. The sexes, whose
manner of life had been hitherto the
same, began now to adopt different ways of living. The women became more
sedentary, and accustomed
themselves to mind the hut and their
children, while the men went abroad in search of their common subsistence. From
living a softer life, both sexes also began to lose something of their strength
and ferocity: but, if individuals became to some extent less able to encounter
wild beasts separately, they found it, on the other hand, easier to assemble
and resist in common.
The simplicity and solitude of man's life
in this new condition, the paucity of his wants, and the implements
he had invented to satisfy
them, left him a great deal of leisure,
which he employed to furnish himself with many conveniences unknown to
his fathers: and this was the
first yoke he inadvertently imposed on
himself, and the first source of the evils he prepared for his
descendants. For, besides continuing thus
to enervate both body and mind, these
conveniences lost with use almost all their power to please, and even
degenerated into real needs, till
the want of them became far more
disagreeable than the possession of them had been pleasant. Men would have
been unhappy at the loss of them, though the possession did not make them
happy.
We can here see a little better how the
use of speech became established, and insensibly improved in
each family, and we may form a
conjecture also concerning the manner in
which various causes may have extended and accelerated the progress of
language, by making it more and more necessary. Floods or earthquakes
surrounded inhabited districts with precipices or waters: revolutions of
the globe tore off portions
from the continent, and made them
islands. It is readily seen that among men thus collected and compelled to live
together, a common idiom must have arisen much more easily than among those who
still wandered through the forests of the continent. Thus it is very possible that
after their first essays in navigation the islanders brought over the use of
speech to the continent: and it is at least very probable that communities and
languages were first established in islands, and even came to perfection there
before they were known on the mainland.
Everything now begins to change its
aspect. Men, who have up to now been roving in the woods, by taking to a more
settled manner of life, come gradually together, form separate bodies, and at
length in every country arises a distinct nation, united in character and
manners, not by
regulations or laws, but by uniformity of
life and food, and the common influence of climate. Permanent
neighbourhood could not fail to produce, in time, some connection between
different families. Among young people of opposite sexes, living in
neighbouring huts, the transient commerce required by nature soon led, through
mutual intercourse, to another kind not less agreeable, and more permanent. Men
began now to take the difference between objects into account, and to make
comparisons; they acquired imperceptibly the ideas of beauty and merit, which
soon gave rise to feelings of preference. In consequence of seeing each other
often, they could not do without seeing each other constantly. A tender and pleasant
feeling insinuated itself into their souls, and the least opposition turned it
into an impetuous fury: with love arose jealousy; discord triumphed, and human
blood was sacrificed to the gentlest of all passions.
As ideas and feelings succeeded one another,
and heart and head were brought into play, men continued to lay
aside their original wildness;
their private connections became every
day more intimate as their limits extended. They accustomed themselves to
assemble before their huts round a large tree; singing and dancing, the true
offspring of love and leisure, became the amusement, or rather
the occupation, of men and
women thus assembled together with
nothing else to do. Each one began to consider the rest, and to wish to be
considered in turn; and thus a
value came to be attached to public
esteem. Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was the handsomest, the strongest,
the most dexterous, or the most eloquent, came to be of most consideration; and
this was the first step towards inequality, and at the same time towards vice.
From these first distinctions arose on the one side vanity and contempt and on
the other shame and envy: and the fermentation caused by these new leavens
ended by producing combinations fatal to innocence and happiness.
As soon as men began to value one
another, and the idea of consideration had got a footing in the mind, every one
put in his claim to it, and it became impossible to refuse it to any with
impunity. Hence arose the first obligations of civility even among savages; and
every intended injury became an affront; because, besides the hurt which might
result from it, the party injured was certain to find in it a contempt for his
person, which was often more
insupportable than the hurt itself.
Thus, as every man punished the contempt
shown him by others, in proportion to his opinion of himself,
revenge became terrible, and men
bloody and cruel. This is precisely the
state reached by most of the savage nations known to us: and it is for
want of having made a proper
distinction in our ideas, and see how
very far they already are from the state of nature, that so many writers
have hastily concluded that man is
naturally cruel, and requires civil
institutions to make him more mild; whereas nothing is more gentle than man
in his primitive state, as he is
placed by nature at an equal distance
from the stupidity of brutes, and the fatal ingenuity of civilised man.
Equally confined by instinct and
reason to the sole care of guarding
himself against the mischiefs which threaten him, he is restrained by natural
compassion from doing any
injury to others, and is not led to do
such a thing even in return for injuries received. For, according to the
axiom of the wise Locke, There
can be no injury, where there is no
property.
But it must be remarked that the society
thus formed, and the relations thus established among men, required of
them qualities different from
those which they possessed from their
primitive constitution. Morality began to appear in human actions, and
every one, before the institution
of law, was the only judge and avenger of
the injuries done him, so that the goodness which was suitable in the
pure state of nature was no
longer proper in the new-born state of
society. Punishments had to be made more severe, as opportunities of
offending became more frequent,
and the dread of vengeance had to take
the place of the rigour of the law. Thus, though men had become less
patient, and their natural
compassion had already suffered some
diminution, this period of expansion of the human faculties, keeping
a just mean between the
indolence of the primitive state and the
petulant activity of our egoism, must have been the happiest and
most stable of epochs. The more we reflect on it, the more we shall find that
this state was the least subject to revolutions, and altogether
the very best man could
experience; so that he can have departed
from it only through some fatal accident, which, for the public good,
should never have happened. The
example of savages, most of whom have
been found in this state, seems to prove that men were meant to remain in it,
that it is the real youth of
the world, and that all subsequent
advances have been apparently so many steps towards the perfection of the
individual, but in reality towards the decrepitude of the species.
So long as men remained content with
their rustic huts, so long as they were satisfied with clothes made of the
skins of animals and sewn
together with thorns and fish-bones,
adorned themselves only with feathers and shells, and continued to
paint their bodies different
colours, to improve and beautify their
bows and arrows and to make with sharp-edged stones fishing boats or
clumsy musical instruments; in a
word, so long as they undertook only what
a single person could accomplish, and confined themselves to
such arts as did not require the
joint labour of several hands, they lived
free, healthy, honest and happy lives, so long as their nature
allowed, and as they continued to
enjoy the pleasures of mutual and
independent intercourse. But from the moment one man began to stand in need of
the help of another; from the moment it appeared advantageous to any one man to
have enough provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced,
work became indispensable, and vast forests became smiling fields, which man
had to water with the sweat of his brow, and where slavery and misery were soon
seen to germinate and grow up with the crops. . . .
From great inequality of fortunes and
conditions, from the vast variety of passions and of talents, of useless
and pernicious arts, of vain
sciences, would arise a multitude of
prejudices equally contrary to reason, happiness and virtue. We should
see the magistrates fomenting
everything that might weaken men united
in society, by promoting dissension among them; everything that
might sow in it the seeds of
actual division, while it gave society
the air of harmony; everything that might inspire the different ranks of
people with mutual hatred and
distrust, by setting the rights and
interests of one against those of another, and so strengthen the power
which comprehended them all.
It is from the midst of this disorder and
these revolutions, that despotism, gradually raising up its
hideous head and devouring
everything that remained sound and
untainted in any part of the State, would at length trample on both the laws
and the people, and establish
itself on the ruins of the republic. The
times which immediately preceded this last change would be times
of trouble and calamity; but at
length the monster would swallow up
everything, and the people would no longer have either chiefs or laws, but only
tyrants. From this moment
there would be no question of virtue or
morality; for despotism cui ex honesto nulla est spes, wherever it
prevails, admits no other master; it
no sooner speaks than probity and duty
lose their weight and blind obedience is the only virtue which slaves
can still practise.
This is the last term of inequality, the
extreme point that closes the circle, and meets that from which we set
out. Here all private persons
return to their first equality, because
they are nothing; and, subjects having no law but the will of their
master, and their master no
restraint but his passions, all notions
of good and all principles of equity again vanish. There is here a
complete return to the law of the
strongest, and so to a new state of
nature, differing from that we set out from; for the one was a state of
nature in its first purity, while
this is the consequence of excessive
corruption. There is so little difference between the two states in
other respects, and the contract of
government is so completely dissolved by
despotism, that the despot is master only so long as he remains the
strongest; as soon as he can be
expelled, he has no right to complain of
violence. The popular insurrection that ends in the death or
deposition of a Sultan is as
lawful an act as those by which he
disposed, the day before, of the lives and fortunes of his subjects. As he
was maintained by force alone,
it is force alone that overthrows him.
Thus everything takes place according to the natural order; and,
whatever may be the result of such
frequent and precipitate revolutions, no
one man has reason to complain of the injustice of another, but only of
his own ill-fortune or
indiscretion.
If the reader thus discovers and retraces
the lost and forgotten road, by which man must have passed from the
state of nature to the state of
society; if he carefully restores, along
with the intermediate situations which I have just described,
those which want of time has
compelled me to suppress, or my
imagination has failed to suggest, he cannot fail to be struck by the vast
distance which separates the two
states. It is in tracing this slow succession
that he will find the solution of a number of problems of
politics and morals, which
philosophers cannot settle. He will feel
that, men being different in different ages, the reason why Diogenes
could not find a man was that he
sought among his contemporaries a man of
an earlier period. He will see that Cato died with Rome and liberty,
because he did not fit the age in
which he lived; the greatest of men
served only to astonish a world which he would certainly have ruled, had
he lived five hundred years
sooner. In a word, he will explain how
the soul and the passions of men insensibly change their very nature; why
our wants and pleasures in the
end seek new objects; and why, the
original man having vanished by degrees, society offers to us only an
assembly of artificial men and
factitious passions, which are the work
of all these new relations, and without any real foundation in nature. We
are taught nothing on this
subject, by reflection, that is not
entirely confirmed by observation. The savage and the civilised man differ
so much in the bottom of their
hearts and in their inclinations, that
what constitutes the supreme happiness of one would reduce the other
to despair. The former breathes
only peace and liberty; he desires only
to live and be free from labour; even the ataraxia of the Stoic falls far
short of his profound indifference to every other object. Civilised man, on the
other hand, is always moving, sweating, toiling and racking his brains to find
still more laborious occupations: he goes on in drudgery to his last moment,
and even seeks death to put himself in a position to live, or renounces life to
acquire immortality. He pays his court to men in power, whom he hates, and to
the wealthy, whom he despises; he stops at nothing to have the honour of
serving them; he is not ashamed to value himself on his own meanness and their
protection; and, proud of his slavery, he speaks with disdain of those, who
have not the honour of sharing it. What a sight would the perplexing and envied
labours of a European minister of State present to the eyes of a Caribbean! How
many cruel deaths would not this indolent savage prefer to the horrors of such
a life, which is seldom even sweetened
by the pleasure of doing good! But, for him to see into the motives of all this
solicitude, the words power and reputation, would have to bear some meaning in
his mind; he would have to know that there are men who set a value on the
opinion of the rest of the world; who can be made happy and satisfied with
themselves rather on the testimony of other people than on their own. In
reality, the source of all these differences is, that the savage lives within
himself, while social man lives constantly outside
himself, and only knows how to live in the opinion of others, so that he
seems to receive the consciousness of his own existence merely from the
judgment of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on
the indifference to good and evil which arises from this
disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how,
everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even
honour, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which
we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how, always
asking others what we are, and never daring to ask ourselves, in the
midst of so much philosophy, humanity and civilisation, and of such
sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a
frivolous and deceitful appearance, honour without virtue, reason
without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. It is sufficient that
I have proved that this is not by any means the original state of man, but that
it is merely the spirit of society, and the inequality which society produces,
that thus transform and alter all our natural inclinations.
I have endeavoured to trace the origin
and progress of inequality, and the institution and abuse of political
societies, as far as these are capable of being deduced from the nature of man
merely by the light of reason, and independently of those sacred dogmas which
give the sanction of divine right to sovereign authority. It follows from this
survey that, as there is hardly any inequality in the state of nature, all the
inequality which now prevails owes its strength and growth to the development
of our faculties and the advance of the human mind, and becomes at last
permanent and legitimate by the establishment of property and laws. Secondly,
it follows that moral inequality, authorised by positive right alone, clashes
with natural right, whenever it is not proportionate to physical inequality; a
distinction which sufficiently determines what we ought to think of that
species of inequality which prevails in all civilised, countries; since it is
plainly contrary to the law of nature, however defined, that children should
command old men, fools wise men, and that the privileged few should gorge
themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the
bare necessities of life.