{"schema_version":1,"access":"public","rights":"Public-domain or compatibly licensed source editions; provenance is retained per record.","work":{"slug":"discours","title":"Discourse on Inequality (Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes)","author":"Jean-Jacques Rousseau","tradition":"european","language":"fr","genre":"political philosophy","period":"1755","source_url":"https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Discours_sur_l’origine_et_les_fondements_de_l’inégalité_parmi_les_hommes","original":{"text":"### Epistle Dedicatory: To the Republic of Geneva, 1\n\nà la République\n\nde Genève.\n\nMagnifiques, très-honorés, et souverains seigneurs,\n\nConvaincu qu’il n’appartient qu’au citoyen vertueux de rendre à sa patrie des honneurs qu’elle puisse avouer, il y a trente ans que je travaille à mériter de vous offrir un hommage public; et cette heureuse occasion suppléant en partie à ce que mes efforts n’ont pu faire, j’ai cru qu’il me serait permis de consulter ici le zèle qui m’anime, plus que le droit qui devrait m’autoriser. Ayant eu le bonheur de naître parmi vous, comment pourrais-je méditer sur l’égalité que la nature a mise entre les hommes et sur l’inégalité qu’ils ont instituée, sans penser à la profonde sagesse avec laquelle l’une et l’autre, heureusement combinées dans cet état, concourent de la manière la plus approchante de la loi naturelle et la plus favorable à la société, au maintien de l’ordre public et au bonheur des particuliers? En recherchant les meilleures maximes que le bon sens puisse dicter sur la constitution d’un gouvernement, j’ai été si frappé de les voir toutes en exécution dans le vôtre, que, même sans être né dans vos murs, j’aurais cru ne pouvoir me dispenser d’offrir ce tableau de la société humaine à celui de tous les peuples qui me paraît en posséder les plus grands avantages, et en avoir le mieux prévenu les abus.\n\nSi j’avais eu à choisir le lieu de ma naissance, j’aurais choisi une société d’une grandeur bornée par l’étendue des facultés humaines, c’est-à-dire par la possibilité d’être bien gouvernée, et où, chacun suffisant à son emploi, nul n’eût été contraint de commettre à d’autres les fonctions dont il était chargé; un état où, tous les particuliers se connaissant entre eux, les manœuvres obscures du vice, ni la modestie de la vertu n’eussent pu se dérober aux regards et au jugement du public, et où cette douce habitude de se voir et de se connaître fît de l’amour de la patrie l’amour des citoyens plutôt que celui de la terre.\n\nJ’aurais voulu naître dans un pays où le souverain et le peuple ne pussent avoir qu’un seul et même intérêt, afin que tous les mouvements de la machine ne tendissent jamais qu’au bonheur commun; ce qui ne pouvant se faire à moins que le peuple et le souverain ne soient une même personne, il s’ensuit que j’aurais voulu naître sous un gouvernement démocratique, sagement tempéré.\n\nJ’aurais voulu vivre et mourir libre, c’est-à-dire tellement soumis aux lois, que ni moi ni personne n’en pût secouer l’honorable joug, ce joug salutaire et doux, que les têtes les plus fières portent d’autant plus docilement qu’elles sont faites pour n’en porter aucun autre.\n\nJ’aurais donc voulu que personne dans l’état n’eût pu se dire au-dessus de la loi, et que personne au-dehors n’en pût imposer que l’état fût obligé de reconnaître; car, quelle que puisse être la constitution d’un  gouvernement, s’il s’y trouve un seul homme qui ne soit pas soumis à la loi, tous les autres sont nécessairement à la discrétion de celui-là; et s’il y a un chef national, et un autre chef étranger, quelque partage d’autorité qu’ils puissent faire, il est impossible que l’un et l’autre soient bien obéis et que l’état soit bien gouverné.\n\nJe n’aurais point voulu habiter une République de nouvelle institution, quelques bonnes lois qu’elle pût avoir, de peur que le gouvernement, autrement constitué peut-être qu’il ne faudrait pour le moment, ne convenant pas aux nouveaux citoyens, ou les citoyens au nouveau gouvernement, l’état ne fût sujet à être ébranlé et détruit presque dès sa naissance; car il en est de la liberté comme de ces aliments solides et succulents, ou de ces vins généreux, propres à nourrir et fortifier les tempéraments robustes qui en ont l’habitude, mais qui accablent, ruinent et enivrent les faibles et délicats qui n’y sont point faits. Les peuples une fois accoutumés à des maîtres ne sont plus en état de s’en passer. S’ils tentent de secouer le joug, ils s’éloignent d’autant plus de la liberté, que, prenant pour elle une licence effrénée qui lui est opposée, leurs révolutions les livrent presque toujours à des séducteurs qui ne font qu’aggraver leurs chaînes. Le peuple romain lui-même, ce modèle de tous les peuples libres, ne fut point en état de se gouverner en sortant de l’oppression des Tarquins. Avili par l’esclavage et les travaux ignominieux qu’ils lui avaient imposés, ce n’était d’abord qu’une stupide populace qu’il fallut ménager et gouverner avec la plus grande sagesse, afin que, s’accoutumant peu-à-peu à respirer l’air salutaire de la liberté, ces ames énervées, ou plutôt  abruties sous la tyrannie, acquissent par degrés cette sévérité de mœurs et cette fierté de courage qui en firent enfin le plus respectable de tous les peuples. J’aurais donc cherché pour ma patrie une heureuse et tranquille république, dont l’ancienneté se perdît en quelque sorte dans la nuit des temps, qui n’eût éprouvé que des atteintes propres à manifester et affermir dans ses habitants le courage et l’amour de la patrie, et où les citoyens, accoutumés de longue main à une sage indépendance, fussent, non seulement libres mais dignes de l’être.\n\nJ’aurais voulu me choisir une patrie détournée, par une heureuse impuissance, du féroce amour des conquêtes, et garantie, par une position encore plus heureuse, de la crainte de devenir elle-même la conquête d’un autre état; une ville libre, placée entre plusieurs peuples dont aucun n’eût intérêt à l’envahir, et dont chacun eût intérêt d’empêcher les autres de l’envahir eux-mêmes; une république, en un mot, qui ne tentât point l’ambition de ses voisins, et qui pût raisonnablement compter sur leur secours au besoin. Il s’ensuit que, dans une position si heureuse, elle n’aurait rien eu à craindre que d’elle-même, et que si ses citoyens s’étaient exercés aux armes, c’eût été plutôt pour entretenir chez eux cette ardeur guerrière et cette fierté de courage qui sied si bien à la liberté et qui en nourrit le goût, que par la nécessité de pourvoir à leur propre défense.\n\nJ’aurais cherché un pays où le droit de législation fût commun à tous les citoyens; car qui peut mieux savoir qu’eux sous quelles conditions il leur convient de vivre ensemble dans une même société? Mais je n’aurais pas approuvé des plébiscites semblables à ceux des Romains, où les chefs de l’état les plus intéressés à sa conservation étaient exclus des délibérations dont souvent dépendait son salut, et où, par une absurde inconséquence, les magistrats étaient privés des droits dont jouissaient les simples citoyens.\n\nAu contraire, j’aurais désiré que, pour arrêter les projets intéressés et mal conçus, et les innovations dangereuses qui perdirent enfin les Athéniens, chacun n’eût pas le pouvoir de proposer de nouvelles lois à sa fantaisie; que ce droit appartînt aux seuls magistrats; qu’ils en usassent même avec tant de circonspection, que le peuple, de son côté, fût si réservé à donner son consentement à ces lois, et que la promulgation ne pût s’en faire qu’avec tant de solennité, qu’avant que la constitution fût ébranlée, on eût le temps de se convaincre que c’est surtout la grande antiquité des lois qui les rend saintes et vénérables; que le peuple méprise bientôt celles qu’il voit changer tous les jours, et qu’en s’accoutumant à négliger les anciens usages, sous prétexte de faire mieux, on introduit souvent de grands maux pour en corriger de moindres.\n\nJ’aurais fui surtout, comme nécessairement mal gouvernée, une république où le peuple, croyant pouvoir se passer de ses magistrats, ou ne leur laisser qu’une autorité précaire, aurait imprudemment gardé l’administration des affaires civiles et l’exécution de ses propres lois: telle dut être la grossière constitution des premiers gouvernements sortant immédiatement de l’état de nature; et tel fut encore un des vices qui perdirent la république d’Athènes.\n\nMais j’aurais choisi celle où les particuliers, se contentant de donner la sanction aux lois, et de décider en corps et sur le rapport des chefs les plus importantes affaires publiques, établiraient des tribunaux respectés, en distingueraient avec soin les divers départements, éliraient d’année en année les plus capables et les plus intègres de leurs concitoyens pour administrer la justice et gouverner l’état, et où la vertu des magistrats portant ainsi témoignage de la sagesse du peuple, les uns et les autres s’honoreraient mutuellement. De sorte que si jamais de funestes malentendus venaient à troubler la concorde publique, ces temps mêmes d’aveuglement et d’erreurs fussent marqués par des témoignages de modération, d’estime réciproque, et d’un commun respect pour les lois; présages et garants d’une réconciliation sincère et perpétuelle.\n\nTels sont, magnifiques, très-honorés, et souverains seigneurs, les avantages que j’aurais recherchés dans la patrie que je me serais choisie. Que si la Providence y avait ajouté de plus une situation charmante, un climat tempéré, un pays fertile, et l’aspect le plus délicieux qui soit sous le ciel, je n’aurais désiré, pour combler mon bonheur, que de jouir de tous ces biens dans le sein de cette heureuse patrie, vivant paisiblement dans une douce société avec mes concitoyens, exerçant envers eux, et à leur exemple, l’humanité, l’amitié et toutes les vertus, et laissant après moi l’honorable mémoire d’un homme de bien et d’un honnête et vertueux patriote.\n\nSi, moins heureux ou trop tard sage, je m’étais vu réduit à finir en d’autres climats une infirme et languissante carrière, regrettant inutilement le repos et la paix dont une jeunesse imprudente m’aurait privé, j’aurais du moins nourri dans mon ame ces mêmes sentiments dont je n’aurais pu faire usage dans mon pays; et pénétré d’une affection tendre et désintéressée pour mes concitoyens éloignés, je leur aurais adressé du fond de mon cœur à peu près le discours suivant:\n\nMes chers concitoyens, ou plutôt mes frères, puisque les liens du sang ainsi que les lois nous unissent presque tous, il m’est doux de ne pouvoir penser à vous sans penser en même temps à tous les biens dont vous jouissez, et dont nul de vous peut-être ne sent mieux le prix que moi qui les ai perdus. Plus je réfléchis sur votre situation politique et civile, et moins je puis imaginer que la nature des choses humaines puisse en comporter une meilleure. Dans tous les autres gouvernements, quand il est question d’assurer le plus grand bien de l’état, tout se borne toujours à des projets en idées, et tout au plus à de simples possibilités: pour vous, votre bonheur est tout fait, il ne faut qu’en jouir; et vous n’avez plus besoin, pour devenir parfaitement heureux, que de savoir vous contenter de l’être. Votre souveraineté, acquise ou recouvrée à la pointe de l’épée, et conservée durant deux siècles à force de valeur et de sagesse, est enfin pleinement et universellement reconnue. Des traités honorables fixent vos limites, assurent vos droits, et affermissent votre repos. Votre constitution est excellente, dictée par la plus sublime raison, et garantie par des puissances amies et respectables; votre état est tranquille; vous n’avez ni guerres ni conquérants à craindre; vous n’avez point d’autres maîtres que de sages lois que vous avez faites, administrées par des magistrats intègres qui sont de votre choix; vous n’êtes ni assez riches pour vous énerver par la mollesse et perdre dans de vaines délices le goût du vrai bonheur et des solides vertus, ni assez pauvres pour avoir besoin de plus de secours étrangers que ne vous en procure votre industrie; et cette liberté précieuse qu’on ne maintient chez les grandes nations qu’avec des impôts exorbitants, ne vous coûte presque rien à conserver.\n\n### Epistle Dedicatory: To the Republic of Geneva, 2\n\nPuisse durer toujours, pour le bonheur de ses citoyens et l’exemple des peuples, une république si sagement et si heureusement constituée! Voilà le seul vœu qui vous reste à faire, et le seul soin qui vous reste à prendre. C’est à vous seuls désormais, non à faire votre bonheur, vos ancêtres vous en ont évité la peine, mais à le rendre durable par la sagesse d’en bien user. C’est de votre union perpétuelle, de votre obéissance aux lois, de votre respect pour leurs ministres, que dépend votre conservation. S’il reste parmi vous le moindre germe d’aigreur ou de défiance, hâtez-vous de le détruire, comme un levain funeste d’où résulteraient tôt ou tard vos malheurs et la ruine de l’état. Je vous conjure de rentrer tous au fond de votre cœur, et de consulter la voix secrète de votre conscience. Quelqu’un parmi vous connaît-il dans l’univers un corps plus intègre, plus éclairé, plus respectable que celui de votre magistrature? Tous ses membres ne vous donnent-ils pas l’exemple de la modération, de la simplicité de mœurs, du respect pour les lois, et de la plus sincère réconciliation? Rendez donc sans réserve à de si sages chefs cette salutaire confiance que la raison doit à la vertu; songez qu’ils sont de votre choix, qu’ils le justifient, et que les  honneurs dus à ceux que vous avez constitués en dignité retombent nécessairement sur vous-mêmes. Nul de vous n’est assez peu éclairé pour ignorer qu’où cessent la vigueur des lois et l’autorité de leurs défenseurs, il ne peut y avoir ni sûreté ni liberté pour personne. De quoi s’agit-il donc entre vous, que de faire de bon cœur et avec une juste confiance ce que vous seriez toujours obligés de faire par un véritable intérêt, par devoir et par raison? Qu’une coupable et funeste indifférence pour le maintient de la constitution ne vous fasse jamais négliger au besoin les sages avis des plus éclairés et des plus zélés d’entre vous; mais que l’équité, la modération, la plus respectueuse fermeté, continuent de régler toutes vos démarches, et de montrer en vous, à tout l’univers, l’exemple d’un peuple fier et modeste, aussi jaloux de sa gloire que de sa liberté. Gardez-vous surtout, et ce sera mon dernier conseil, d’écouter jamais des interprétations sinistres et des discours envenimés, dont les motifs secrets sont souvent plus dangereux que les actions qui en sont l’objet. Toute une maison s’éveille et se tient en alarmes aux premiers cris d’un bon et fidèle gardien qui n’aboie jamais qu’à l’approche des voleurs; mais on hait l’importunité de ces animaux bruyants qui troublent sans cesse le repos public, et dont les avertissements continuels et déplacés ne se font pas même écouter au moment qu’ils sont nécessaires.\n\nEt vous magnifiques et très-honorés seigneurs, vous, dignes et respectables magistrats d’un peuple libre; permettez-moi de vous offrir en particulier mes hommages et mes devoirs. S’il y a dans le monde un rang propre à illustrer ceux qui l’occupent, c’est sans doute celui que donnent les talents et la vertu, celui dont vous vous êtes rendus dignes, et auquel vos concitoyens vous ont élevés. Leur propre mérite ajoute encore au vôtre un nouvel éclat; et, choisis par des hommes capables d’en gouverner d’autres pour les gouverner eux-mêmes, je vous trouve autant au-dessus des autres magistrats, qu’un peuple libre, et surtout celui que vous avez l’honneur de conduire, est, par ses lumières et par sa raison, au-dessus de la populace des autres états.\n\nQu’il me soit permis de citer un exemple dont il devrait rester de meilleures traces, et qui sera toujours présent à mon cœur. Je ne me rappelle point sans la plus douce émotion la mémoire du vertueux citoyen de qui j’ai reçu le jour, et qui souvent entretint mon enfance du respect qui vous était dû. Je le vois encore, vivant du travail de ses mains, et nourrissant son ame des vérités les plus sublimes. Je vois Tacite, Plutarque et Grotius, mêlés devant lui avec les instruments de son métier. Je vois à ses côtés un fils, chéri recevant avec trop peu de fruit les tendres instructions du meilleur des pères. Mais si les égarements d’une folle jeunesse me firent oublier durant un temps de si sages leçons, j’ai le bonheur d’éprouver enfin que, quelque penchant qu’on ait vers le vice, il est difficile qu’une éducation dont le cœur se mêle reste perdue pour toujours.\n\nTels sont, magnifiques et très-honorés seigneurs, les citoyens et même les simples habitants nés dans l’état que vous gouvernez; tels sont ces hommes instruits et sensés dont, sous le nom d’ouvriers et de peuple, on a chez les autres nations des idées si basses et si fausses. Mon père, je l’avoue avec joie, n’était point distingué parmi ses concitoyens, il n’était que ce qu’ils sont tous, et, tel qu’il était, il n’y a point de pays où sa société n’eût été recherchée, cultivée, et même avec fruit, par les plus honnêtes gens. Il ne m’appartient pas, et graces au ciel, il n’est pas nécessaire de vous parler des égards que peuvent attendre de vous des hommes de cette trempe, vos égaux par l’éducation ainsi que par les droits de la nature et de la naissance; vos inférieurs par leur volonté, par la préférence qu’ils devaient à votre mérite, qu’ils lui ont accordée, et pour laquelle vous leur devez à votre tour une sorte de reconnaissance. J’apprends avec une vive satisfaction de combien de douceur et de condescendance vous tempérez avec eux la gravité convenable aux ministres des lois; combien vous leur rendez en estime et en attentions ce qu’ils vous doivent d’obéissance et de respect; conduite pleine de justice et de sagesse, propre à éloigner de plus en plus la mémoire des événements malheureux qu’il faut oublier pour ne les revoir jamais; conduite d’autant plus judicieuse que ce peuple équitable et généreux se fait un plaisir de son devoir, qu’il aime naturellement à vous honorer, et que les plus ardents à soutenir leurs droits sont les plus portés à respecter les vôtres.\n\nIl ne doit pas être étonnant que les chefs d’une société civile en aiment la gloire et le bonheur; mais il l’est trop pour le repos des hommes que ceux qui se regardent comme les magistrats, ou plutôt comme les maîtres d’une patrie plus sainte et plus sublime, témoignent quelque amour pour la patrie terrestre qui les nourrit. Qu’il m’est doux de pouvoir faire en notre faveur une exception si rare, et placer au rang de nos meilleurs citoyens ces zélés dépositaires des dogmes sacrés autorisés par les lois, ces vénérables pasteurs des ames, dont la vive et douce éloquence porte d’autant mieux dans les cœurs les maximes de l’Évangile, qu’ils commencent toujours par les pratiquer eux-mêmes! Tout le monde sait avec quel succès le grand art de la chaire est cultivé à Genève. Mais, trop accoutumés à voir dire d’une manière et faire d’une autre, peu de gens savent jusqu’à quel point l’esprit du christianisme, la sainteté des mœurs, la sévérité pour soi-même et la douceur pour autrui, règnent dans le corps de nos ministres. Peut-être appartient-il à la seule ville de Genève de montrer l’exemple édifiant d’une aussi parfaite union entre une société de théologiens et de gens de lettres; c’est en grande partie sur leur sagesse et leur modération reconnues, c’est sur leur zèle pour la prospérité de l’état que je fonde l’espoir de son éternelle tranquillité; et je remarque, avec un plaisir mêlé d’étonnement et de respect, combien ils ont d’horreur pour les affreuses maximes de ces hommes sacrés et barbares dont l’histoire fournit plus d’un exemple, et qui, pour soutenir les prétendus droits de Dieu, c’est-à-dire leurs intérêts, étaient d’autant moins avares du sang humain, qu’ils se flattaient que le leur serait toujours respecté.\n\nPourrais-je oublier cette précieuse moitié de la république qui fait le bonheur de l’autre, et dont la douceur et la sagesse y maintiennent la paix et les bonnes mœurs? Aimables et vertueuses citoyennes, le sort de votre sexe sera toujours de gouverner le nôtre. Heureux quand votre chaste pouvoir, exercé seulement dans l’union conjugale, ne se fait sentir que pour la gloire de l'état et le bonheur public! C’est ainsi que les femmes commandaient à Sparte, et c’est ainsi que vous méritez de commander à Genève. Quel homme barbare pourrait résister à la voix de l’honneur et de la raison dans la bouche d’une tendre épouse? et qui ne mépriserait un vain luxe, en voyant votre simple et modeste parure, qui, par l’éclat qu’elle tient de vous, semble être la plus favorable à la beauté? C’est à vous de maintenir toujours, par votre aimable et innocent empire, et par votre esprit insinuant, l’amour des lois dans l’état et la concorde parmi les citoyens; de réunir, par d’heureux mariages, les familles divisées, et surtout de corriger, par la persuasive douceur de vos leçons, et par les graces modestes de votre entretien, les travers que nos jeunes gens vont prendre en d’autres pays, d’où, au lieu de tant de choses utiles dont ils pourraient profiter, ils ne rapportent, avec un ton puéril et des airs ridicules pris parmi des femmes perdues, que de l’admiration de je ne sais quelles prétendues grandeurs, frivoles dédommagements de la servitude, qui ne vaudront jamais l’auguste liberté. Soyez donc toujours ce que vous êtes, les chastes gardiennes des mœurs et les doux liens de la paix; et continuez de faire valoir, en toute occasion, les droits du cœur et de la nature au profit du devoir et de la vertu.\n\nJe me flatte de n’être point démenti par l’événement en fondant sur de tels garants l’espoir du bonheur commun des citoyens et de la gloire de la république. J’avoue qu’avec tous ces avantages elle ne brillera pas de cet éclat dont la plupart des yeux sont éblouis, et dont le puéril et funeste goût est le plus mortel ennemi du  bonheur et de la liberté. Qu’une jeunesse dissolue aille chercher ailleurs des plaisirs faciles et de longs repentirs; que les prétendus gens de goût admirent en d’autres lieux la grandeur des palais, la beauté des équipages, les superbes ameublements, la pompe des spectacles, et tous les raffinements de la mollesse et du luxe: à Genève on ne trouvera que des hommes; mais pourtant un tel spectacle a bien son prix, et ceux qui le rechercheront vaudront bien les admirateurs du reste.\n\nDaignez, magnifiques, très-honorés et souverains seigneurs, recevoir tous avec la même bonté les respectueux témoignages de l’intérêt que je prends à votre prospérité commune. Si j’étais assez malheureux pour être coupable de quelque transport indiscret dans cette vive effusion de mon cœur, je vous supplie de le pardonner à la tendre affection d’un vrai patriote, et au zèle ardent et légitime d’un homme qui n’envisage point de plus grand bonheur pour lui-même que celui de vous voir tous heureux.\n\nJe suis avec le plus profond respect,\n\nmagnifiques, très-honorés et souverains seigneurs,\n\nVotre très-humble et très-obéissant serviteur et concitoyen,\n\nJ. J. ROUSSEAU.\n\nÀ Chambéry, le 12 juin 1754.\n\n### Preface\n\nPRÉFACE.\n\nLa plus utile et la moins avancée de toutes les connaissances humaines me paraît être celle de l’homme; et j’ose dire que la seule inscription du temple de Delphes contenait un précepte plus important et plus difficile que tous les gros livres des moralistes. Aussi je regarde le sujet de ce discours comme une des questions les plus intéressantes que la philosophie puisse proposer, et, malheureusement pour nous, comme une des plus épineuses que les philosophes puissent résoudre: car comment connaître la source de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, si l’on ne commence par les connaître eux-mêmes? et comment l’homme viendra-t-il à bout de se voir tel que l’a formé la nature, à travers tous les changements que la succession des temps et des choses a dû produire dans sa constitution originelle, et de démêler ce qu’il tient de son propre fonds d’avec ce que les circonstances et ses progrès ont ajouté ou changé à son état primitif? Semblable à la statue de Glaucus, que le temps, la mer et les orages avaient tellement défigurée qu’elle ressemblait moins à un dieu qu’à une bête féroce, l’ame humaine, altérée au sein de la société par mille causes sans cesse renaissantes, par l’acquisition d’une multitude de connaissances et d’erreurs, par les changements arrivés à la constitution des corps, et par le choc continuel des passions, a pour ainsi dire changé d’apparence au point d’être presque méconnaissable; et l’on n’y trouve plus, au lieu d’un être agissant toujours par des principes certains et invariables, au lieu de cette céleste et majestueuse simplicité dont son auteur l’avait empreinte, que le difforme contraste de la passion qui croit raisonner, et de l’entendement en délire.\n\nCe qu’il y a de plus cruel encore, c’est que tous les progrès de l’espèce humaine l’éloignant sans cesse de son état primitif, plus nous accumulons de nouvelles connaissances, et plus nous nous ôtons les moyens d’acquérir la plus importante de toutes; et que c’est en un sens à force d’étudier l’homme que nous nous sommes mis hors d’état de le connaître.\n\nIl est aisé de voir que c’est dans ces changements successifs de la constitution humaine qu’il faut chercher la première origine des différences qui distinguent les hommes, lesquels, d’un commun aveu, sont naturellement aussi égaux entre eux que l’étaient les animaux de chaque espèce avant que diverses causes physiques eussent introduit dans quelques-unes les variétés que nous y remarquons. En effet, il n’est pas concevable que ces premiers changements, par quelque moyen qu’ils soient arrivés, aient altéré, tout à la fois et de la même manière, tous les individus de l’espèce; mais les uns s’étant perfectionnés ou détériorés, et ayant acquis diverses qualités, bonnes ou mauvaises, qui n’étaient point inhérentes à leur nature, les autres restèrent plus longtemps dans leur état originel: et telle fut parmi les hommes la première source de l’inégalité, qu’il est plus aisé de démontrer ainsi en général que d’en assigner avec précision les véritables causes.\n\nQue mes lecteurs ne s’imaginent donc pas que j’ose me flatter d’avoir vu ce qui me paraît si difficile à voir. J’ai commencé quelques raisonnements, j’ai hasardé quelques conjectures, moins dans l’espoir de résoudre la question, que dans l’intention de l’éclaircir et de la réduire à son véritable état. D’autres pourront aisément aller plus loin dans la même route, sans qu’il soit facile à personne d’arriver au terme; car ce n’est pas une légère entreprise de démêler ce qu’il y a d’originaire et d’artificiel dans la nature actuelle de l’homme, et de bien connaître un état qui n’existe plus, qui n’a peut-être point existé, qui probablement n’existera jamais, et dont il est pourtant nécessaire d’avoir des notions justes, pour bien juger de notre état présent. Il faudrait même plus de philosophie qu’on ne pense à celui qui entreprendrait de déterminer les précautions à prendre pour faire sur ce sujet de solides observations; et une bonne solution du problème suivant ne me paraîtrait pas indigne des Aristote et des Pline de notre siècle: « Quelles expériences seraient nécessaires pour parvenir à connaître l’homme naturel; et quels sont les moyens de faire ces expériences au sein de la société? » Loin d’entreprendre de résoudre ce problème, je crois en avoir assez médité le sujet pour oser répondre d’avance que les plus grands philosophes ne seront pas trop bons pour diriger ces expériences, ni les plus puissants souverains pour les faire; concours auquel il n’est guère raisonnable de s’attendre, surtout avec la persévérance ou plutôt la succession de lumières et de bonne volonté nécessaire de part et d’autre pour arriver au succès.\n\nCes recherches si difficiles à faire, et auxquelles on a si peu songé jusqu’ici, sont pourtant les seuls moyens qui nous restent de lever une multitude de difficultés qui nous dérobent la connaissance des fondements réels de la société humaine. C’est cette ignorance de la nature de l’homme qui jette tant d’incertitude et d’obscurité sur la véritable définition du droit naturel: car l’idée du droit, dit M. Burlamaqui, et plus encore celle du droit naturel, sont manifestement des idées relatives à la nature de l’homme. C’est donc de cette nature même de l’homme, continue-t-il, de sa constitution et de son état, qu’il faut déduire les principes de cette science.\n\nCe n’est point sans surprise et sans scandale qu’on remarque le peu d’accord qui règne sur cette importante matière entre les divers auteurs qui en ont traité. Parmi les plus graves écrivains, à peine en trouve-t-on deux qui soient du même avis sur ce point. Sans parler des anciens philosophes, qui semblent avoir pris à tâche de se contredire entre eux sur les principes les plus fondamentaux, les jurisconsultes romains assujettissent indifféremment l’homme et tous les autres animaux à la même loi naturelle, parce qu’ils considèrent plutôt sous ce nom la loi que la nature s’impose à elle-même que celle qu’elle prescrit, ou plutôt à cause de l’acception particulière selon laquelle ces jurisconsultes entendent le mot de loi, qu’ils semblent n’avoir pris en cette occasion que pour l’expression des rapports généraux établis par la nature entre tous les êtres animés pour leur commune conservation. Les modernes ne reconnaissant, sous le nom de loi, qu’une règle prescrite à un être moral, c’est-à-dire intelligent, libre, et considéré dans ses rapports avec d’autres êtres, bornent conséquemment au seul animal doué de raison, c’est-à-dire à l’homme, la compétence de la loi naturelle; mais définissant cette loi chacun à sa mode, ils l’établissent tous sur des principes si métaphysiques, qu’il y a, même parmi nous, bien peu de gens en état de comprendre ces principes, loin de pouvoir les trouver d’eux-mêmes. De sorte que toutes les définitions de ces savants hommes, d’ailleurs en perpétuelle contradiction entre elles, s’accordent seulement en ceci, qu’il est impossible d’entendre la loi de nature, et par conséquent d’y obéir, sans être un très grand raisonneur et un profond métaphysicien: ce qui signifie précisément que les hommes ont dû employer pour l’établissement de la société des lumières qui ne se développent qu’avec beaucoup de peine, et pour fort peu de gens, dans le sein de la société même.\n\nConnaissant si peu la nature, et s’accordant si mal sur le sens du mot loi, il serait bien difficile de convenir d’une bonne définition de la loi naturelle. Aussi toutes celles qu’on trouve dans les livres, outre le défaut de n’être point uniformes, ont-elles encore celui d’être tirées de plusieurs connaissances que les hommes n’ont point naturellement, et des avantages dont ils ne peuvent concevoir l’idée qu’après être sortis de l’état de nature. On commence par rechercher les règles dont, pour l’utilité commune, il serait à propos que les hommes convinssent entre eux; et puis on donne le nom de loi naturelle à la collection de ces règles, sans autre preuve que le bien qu’on trouve qui résulterait de leur pratique universelle. Voilà assurément une manière très commode de composer des définitions, et d’expliquer la nature des choses par des convenances presque arbitraires.\n\nMais, tant que nous ne connaîtrons point l’homme naturel, c’est en vain que nous voudrons déterminer la loi qu’il a reçue, ou celle qui convient le mieux à sa constitution. Tout ce que nous pouvons voir très clairement au sujet de cette loi, c’est que non seulement, pour qu’elle soit loi, il faut que la volonté de celui qu’elle oblige puisse s’y soumettre avec connaissance, mais il faut encore, pour qu’elle soit naturelle, qu’elle parle immédiatement par la voix de la nature.\n\nLaissant donc tous les livres scientifiques qui ne nous apprennent qu’à voir les hommes tels qu’ils se sont faits, et mé ditant sur les premières et plus simples opérations de l’ame humaine, j’y crois apercevoir deux principes antérieurs à la raison, dont l’un nous intéresse ardemment à notre bien-être et à la conservation de nous-mêmes, et l’autre nous inspire une répugnance naturelle à voir périr ou souffrir tout être sensible, et principalement nos semblables. C’est du concours et de la combinaison que notre esprit est en état de faire de ces deux principes, sans qu’il soit nécessaire d’y faire entrer celui de la sociabilité, que me paraissent découler toutes les règles du droit naturel; règles que la raison est ensuite forcée de rétablir sur d’autres fondements, quand, par ses développements successifs, elle est venue à bout d’étouffer la nature.\n\nDe cette manière on n’est point obligé de faire de l’homme un philosophe avant que d’en faire un homme; ses devoirs envers autrui ne lui sont pas uniquement dictés par les tardives leçons de la sagesse; et tant qu’il ne résistera point à l’impulsion intérieure de la commisération, il ne fera jamais du mal à un autre homme, ni même à aucun être sensible, excepté dans le cas légitime où, sa conservation se trouvant intéressée, il est obligé de se donner la préférence à lui-même. Par ce moyen on termine aussi les anciennes disputes sur la participation des animaux à la loi naturelle; car il est clair que, dépourvus de lumières et de liberté, ils ne peuvent reconnaître cette loi; mais tenant en quelque chose à notre nature par la sensibilité dont ils sont doués, on jugera qu’ils doivent aussi participer au droit naturel, et que l’homme est assujetti envers eux à quelque espèce de devoirs. Il semble en effet que si je suis obligé de ne faire aucun mal à mon semblable, c’est moins parce qu’il est un être raisonnable que parce qu’il est un être sensible, qualité qui, étant commune à la bête et à l’homme, doit au moins donner à l’une le droit de n’être point maltraitée inutilement par l’autre.\n\nCette même étude de l’homme originel, de ses vrais besoins, et des principes fondamentaux de ses devoirs, est encore le seul bon moyen qu’on puisse employer pour lever ces foules de difficultés qui se présentent sur l’origine de l’inégalité morale, sur les vrais fondements du corps politique, sur les droits réciproques de ses membres, et sur mille autres questions semblables, aussi importantes que mal éclaircies.\n\nEn considérant la société humaine d’un regard tranquille et désintéressé, elle ne semble montrer d’abord que la violence des hommes puissants et l’oppression des faibles: l’esprit se révolte contre la dureté des uns, ou est porté à déplorer l’aveuglement des autres; et comme rien n’est moins stable parmi les hommes que ces relations extérieures que le hasard produit plus souvent que la sagesse, et que l’on appelle faiblesse ou puissance, richesse ou pauvreté, les établissements humains paraissent, au premier coup d’œil, fondés sur des monceaux de sable mouvant: ce n’est qu’en les examinant de près, ce n’est qu’après avoir écarté la poussière et le sable qui environnent l’édifice, qu’on aperçoit la base inébranlable sur laquelle il est élevé, et qu’on apprend à en respecter les fondements. Or, sans l’étude sérieuse de l’homme, de ses facultés naturelles, et de leurs développements successifs, on ne viendra jamais à bout de faire ces distinctions, et de séparer, dans l’actuelle constitution des choses, ce qu’a fait la volonté divine d’avec ce que l’art humain a prétendu faire. Les recherches politiques et morales auxquelles donne lieu l’importante question que j’examine sont donc utiles de toutes manières, et l’histoire hypothétique des gouvernements est pour l’homme une leçon instructive à tous égards. En considérant ce que nous serions devenus abandonnés à nous-mêmes, nous devons apprendre à bénir celui dont la main bienfaisante, corrigeant nos institutions et leur donnant une assiette inébranlable, a prévenu les désordres qui devraient en résulter, et fait naître notre bonheur des moyens qui semblaient devoir combler notre misère.\n\nQuem te Deus esse\n\nJussit, et humanâ qua parte locatus es in re,\n\nDisce.\n\nPers. sat. III, v. 71.\n\n### Part One, 1\n\nDISCOURS\n\nSUR\n\nL’ORIGINE ET LES FONDEMENTS\n\nDE L’INÉGALITÉ\n\nPARMI LES HOMMES.\n\nC’est de l’homme que j’ai à parler; et la question que j’examine m’apprend que je vais parler à des hommes; car on n’en propose point de semblables quand on craint d’honorer la vérité. Je défendrai donc avec confiance la cause de l’humanité devant les sages qui m’y invitent, et je ne serai pas mécontent de moi-même si je me rends digne de mon sujet et de mes juges.\n\nJe conçois dans l’espèce humaine deux sortes d’inégalités: l’une, que j’appelle naturelle ou physique, parce qu’elle est établie par la nature, et qui consiste dans la différence des âges, de la santé, des forces du corps et des qualités de l’esprit ou de l’ame; l’autre qu’on peut appeler inégalité morale ou politique parce qu’elle dépend d’une sorte de convention, et qu’elle est établie ou du moins autorisée par le consentement des hommes. Celle-ci consiste dans les différents privilèges dont quelques-uns jouissent au préjudice des autres, comme d’être plus riches, plus honorés, plus puissants qu’eux, ou même de s’en faire obéir.\n\nOn ne peut pas demander quelle est la source de l’inégalité naturelle, parce que la réponse se trouverait énoncée dans la simple définition du mot. On peut encore moins chercher s’il n’y aurait point quelque liaison essentielle entre les deux inégalités; car ce serait demander en d’autres termes si ceux qui commandent valent nécessairement mieux que ceux qui obéissent, et si la force du corps ou de l’esprit, la sagesse ou la vertu, se trouvent toujours dans les mêmes individus en proportion de la puissance ou de la richesse: question bonne peut-être à agiter entre des esclaves entendus de leurs maîtres, mais qui ne convient pas à des hommes raisonnables et libres, qui cherchent la vérité.\n\nDe quoi s’agit-il donc précisément dans ce Discours? De marquer dans le progrès des choses le moment où, le droit succédant à la violence, la nature fut soumise à la loi; d’expliquer par quel enchaînement de prodiges le fort put se résoudre à servir le faible, et le peuple à acheter un repos en idée au prix d’une félicité réelle.\n\nLes philosophes qui ont examiné les fondements de la société ont tous senti la nécessité de remonter jusqu’à l’état de nature, mais aucun d’eux n’y est arrivé. Les uns n’ont point balancé à supposer à l’homme dans cet état la notion du juste et de l’injuste, sans se soucier de montrer qu’il dût avoir cette notion, ni même qu’elle lui fût utile. D’autres ont parlé du droit naturel que chacun a de conserver ce qui lui appartient, sans expliquer ce qu’ils entendaient par appartenir. D’autres, donnant d’abord au plus fort l’autorité sur le plus faible, ont aussitôt fait naître le gouvernement, sans songer au temps qui dut s’écouler avant que le sens des mots d’autorité et de gouvernement pût exister parmi les hommes. Enfin tous, parlant sans cesse de besoin, d’avidité, d’oppression, de désirs, et d’orgueil, ont transporté à l’état de nature des idées qu’ils avaient prises dans la société: ils parlaient de l’homme sauvage, et ils peignaient l’homme civil. Il n’est pas même venu dans l’esprit de la plupart des nôtres de douter que l’état de nature eût existé, tandis qu’il est évident, par la lecture des livres sacrés, que le premier homme, ayant reçu immédiatement de Dieu des lumières et des préceptes, n’était point lui-même dans cet état, et qu’en ajoutant aux écrits de Moïse la foi que leur doit tout philosophe chrétien, il faut nier que, même avant le déluge, les hommes se soient jamais trouvés dans le pur état de nature, à moins qu’ils n’y soient retombés par quelque événement extraordinaire: paradoxe fort embarrassant à défendre et tout-à-fait impossible à prouver.\n\nCommençons donc par écarter tous les faits, car ils ne touchent point à la question. Il ne faut pas prendre les recherches dans lesquelles on peut entrer sur ce sujet pour des vérités historiques, mais seulement pour des raisonnements hypothétiques et conditionnels, plus propres à éclaircir la nature des choses qu’à en montrer la véritable origine, et semblables à ceux que font tous les jours nos physiciens sur la formation du monde. La religion nous ordonne de croire que Dieu lui-même ayant tiré les hommes de l’état de nature immédiatement après la création, ils sont inégaux parce qu’il a voulu qu’ils le fussent; mais elle ne nous défend pas de former des conjectures tirées de la seule nature de l’homme et des êtres qui l’environnent, sur ce qu’aurait pu devenir le genre humain s’il fût resté abandonné à lui-même. Voilà ce qu’on me demande, et ce que je me propose d’examiner dans ce Discours. Mon sujet intéressant l’homme en général, je tâcherai de prendre un langage qui convienne à toutes les nations; ou plutôt, oubliant les temps et les lieux pour ne songer qu’aux hommes à qui je parle, je me supposerai dans le lycée d’Athènes, répétant les leçons de mes maîtres, ayant les Platon et les Xénocrate pour juges, et le genre humain pour auditeur.\n\nÔ homme, de quelque contrée que tu sois, quelles que soient tes opinions, écoute; voici ton histoire, telle que j’ai cru la lire, non dans les livres de tes semblables, qui sont menteurs, mais dans la nature, qui ne ment jamais. Tout ce qui sera d’elle sera vrai; Il n’y aura de faux que ce que j’y aurai mêlé du mien sans le vouloir. Les temps dont je vais parler sont bien éloignés: combien tu as changé de ce que tu étais! C’est, pour ainsi dire, la vie de ton espèce que je te vais décrire d’après les qualités que tu as reçues, que ton éducation et tes habitudes ont pu dépraver, mais qu’elles n’ont pu détruire. Il y a, je le sens, un âge auquel l’homme individuel voudrait s’arrêter: tu chercheras l’âge auquel tu désirerais que ton espèce se fût arrêtée. Mécontent de ton état présent par des raisons qui annoncent à ta postérité malheureuse de plus grands mécontentements encore, peut-être voudrais-tu pouvoir rétrograder; et ce sentiment doit faire l’éloge de tes premiers aïeux, la critique de tes contemporains, et l’effroi de ceux qui auront le malheur de vivre après toi.\n\nPREMIÈRE PARTIE.\n\nQuelque important qu’il soit, pour bien juger de l’état naturel de l’homme, de le considérer dès son origine et de l’examiner, pour ainsi dire, dans le premier embryon de l’espèce, je ne suivrai point son organisation à travers ses développements successifs: je ne m’arrêterai pas à rechercher dans le système animal ce qu’il put être au commencement pour devenir enfin ce qu’il est. Je n’examinerai pas si, comme le pense Aristote, ses ongles allongés ne furent point d’abord des griffes crochues; s’il n’était point velu comme un ours; et si, marchant à quatre pieds (Note 3), ses regards dirigés vers la terre, et bornés à un horizon de quelques pas, ne marquaient point à la fois le caractère et les limites de ses idées. Je ne pourrais former sur ce sujet que des conjectures vagues et presque imaginaires. L’anatomie comparée a fait encore trop peu de progrès, les observations des naturalistes sont encore trop incertaines, pour qu’on puisse établir sur de pareils fondements la base d’un raisonnement solide: ainsi, sans avoir recours aux connaissances surnaturelles que nous avons sur ce point, et sans avoir égard aux changements qui ont dû survenir dans la conformation, tant intérieure qu’extérieure, de l’homme, à mesure qu’il appliquait ses membres à de nouveaux usages et qu’il se nourrissait de nouveaux aliments, je le supposerai conformé de tout temps comme je le vois aujourd’hui, marchant à deux pieds, se servant de ses mains comme nous faisons des nôtres, portant ses regards sur toute la nature, et mesurant des yeux la vaste étendue du ciel. En dépouillant cet être ainsi constitué de tous les dons surnaturels qu’il a pu recevoir, et de toutes les facultés artificielles qu’il n’a pu acquérir que par de longs progrès; en le considérant en un mot tel qu’il a dû sortir des mains de la nature, je vois un animal moins fort que les uns, moins agile que les autres, mais, à tout prendre, organisé le plus avantageusement de tous: je le vois se rassasiant sous un chêne, se désaltérant au premier ruisseau, trouvant son lit au pied du même arbre qui lui a fourni son repas; et voilà ses besoins satisfaits.\n\nLa terre, abandonnée à sa fertilité naturelle (Note 4), et couverte de forêts immenses que la cognée ne mutila jamais, offre à chaque pas des magasins et des retraites aux animaux de toute espèce. Les hommes, dispersés parmi eux, observent, imitent leur industrie, et s’élèvent ainsi jusqu’à l’instinct des bêtes; avec cet avantage que chaque espèce n’a que le sien propre, et que l’homme, n’en ayant peut-être aucun qui lui appartienne, se les approprie tous, se nourrit également de la plupart des aliments divers (Note 5) que les autres animaux se partagent, et trouve par conséquent sa subsistance plus aisément que ne peut faire aucun d’eux.\n\nAccoutumés dès l’enfance aux intempéries de l’air et à la rigueur des saisons, exercés à la fatigue, et forcés de défendre nus et sans armes leur vie et leur proie contre les autres bêtes féroces, ou de leur échapper à la course, les hommes se forment un tempérament robuste et presque inaltérable; les enfants, apportant au monde l’excellente constitution de leurs pères et la fortifiant par les mêmes exercices qui l’ont produite, acquièrent ainsi toute la vigueur dont l’espèce humaine est capable. La nature en use précisément avec eux comme la loi de Sparte avec les enfants des citoyens; elle rend forts et robustes ceux qui sont bien constitués, et fait périr tous les autres: différente en cela de nos sociétés, où l’état, en rendant les enfants onéreux aux pères, les tue indistinctement avant leur naissance.\n\nLe corps de l’homme sauvage étant le seul instrument qu’il connaisse, il l’emploie à divers usages, dont, par le défaut d’exercice, les nôtres sont incapables, et c’est notre industrie qui nous ôte la force et l’agilité que la nécessité l’oblige d’acquérir. S’il avait eu une hache, son poignet romprait-il de si fortes branches? S’il avait eu une fronde, lancerait-il de la main une pierre avec tant de roideur? s’il avait eu une échelle, grimperait-il si légèrement sur un arbre? s’il avait eu un cheval, serait-il si vite à la course? Laissez à l’homme civilisé le temps de rassembler toutes ses machines autour de lui, on ne peut douter qu’il ne surmonte facilement l’homme sauvage: mais si vous voulez voir un combat plus inégal encore, mettez-les nus et désarmés vis-à-vis l’un de l’autre, et vous reconnaîtrez bientôt quel est l’avantage d’avoir sans cesse toutes ses forces à sa disposition, d’être toujours prêt à tout événement, et de se porter, pour ainsi dire, toujours tout entier avec soi (Note 6).\n\nHobbes prétend que l’homme est naturellement intrépide, et ne cherche qu’à attaquer et combattre. Un philosophe illustre pense, au contraire, et Cumberland et Puffendorf l’assurent aussi, que rien n’est si timide que l’homme dans l’état de nature, et qu’il est toujours tremblant et prêt à fuir au moindre bruit qui le frappe, au moindre mouvement qu’il aperçoit. Cela peut être ainsi pour les objets qu’il ne connaît pas; et je ne doute point qu’il ne soit effrayé par tous les nouveaux spectacles qui s’offrent à lui toutes les fois qu’il ne peut distinguer le bien et le mal physiques qu’il en doit attendre, ni comparer ses forces avec les dangers qu’il a à courir; circonstances rares dans l’état de nature, où toutes choses marchent d’une manière si uniforme, et où la face de la terre n’est point sujette à ces changements brusques et continuels qu’y causent les passions et l’inconstance des peuples réunis. Mais l’homme sauvage, vivant dispersé parmi les animaux, et se trouvant de bonne heure dans le cas de se mesurer avec eux, il en fait bientôt la comparaison; et, sentant qu’il les surpasse plus en adresse qu’ils ne le surpassent en force, il apprend à ne les plus craindre. Mettez un ours ou un loup aux prises avec un sauvage robuste, agile, courageux, comme ils sont tous, armé de pierres et d’un bon bâton, et vous verrez que le péril sera tout au moins réciproque, et qu’après plusieurs expériences pareilles, les bêtes féroces, qui n’aiment point à s’attaquer l’une à l’autre, s’attaqueront peu volontiers à l’homme, qu’elles auront trouvé tout aussi féroce qu’elles. À l’égard des animaux qui ont réellement plus de force qu’il n’a d’adresse, il est vis-à-vis d’eux dans le cas des autres espèces plus faibles, qui ne laissent pas de subsister; avec cet avantage pour l’homme que, non moins dispos qu’eux à la course, et trouvant sur les arbres un refuge presque assuré, il a partout le prendre et le laisser dans la rencontre, et le choix de la fuite ou du combat. Ajoutons qu’il ne paraît pas qu’aucun animal fasse naturellement la guerre à l’homme hors le cas de sa propre défense ou d’une extrême faim, ni témoigne contre lui de ces violentes antipathies qui semblent annoncer qu’une espèce est destinée par la nature à servir de pâture à l’autre.\n\nVoilà sans doute les raisons pourquoi les nègres et les sauvages se mettent si peu en peine des bêtes féroces qu'ils peuvent rencontrer dans les bois. Les Caraïbes de Venezuela vivent entre autres à cet égard dans la plus profonde sécurité et sans le moindre inconvénient. Quoiqu’ils soient presque nus, dit François Corréal, ils ne laissent pas de s’exposer hardiment dans les bois, armés seulement de la flèche et de l’arc; mais on n’a jamais ouï dire qu’aucun d’eux ait été dévoré des bêtes.\n\n### Part One, 2\n\nD’autres ennemis plus redoutables, et dont l’homme n’a pas les mêmes moyens de se défendre, sont les infirmités naturelles, l’enfance, la vieillesse, et les maladies de toute espèce; tristes signes de notre faiblesse, dont les deux premiers sont communs à tous les animaux, et dont le dernier appartient principalement à l’homme vivant en société. J’observe même, au sujet de l’enfance, que la mère, portant partout son enfant avec elle, a beaucoup plus de facilité à le nourrir que n’ont les femelles de plusieurs animaux, qui sont forcées d’aller et venir sans cesse avec beaucoup de fatigue, d’un côté pour chercher leur pâture, et de l’autre, pour allaiter ou nourrir leurs petits. Il est vrai que, si la femme vient à périr, l’enfant risque fort de périr avec elle; mais ce danger est commun à cent autres espèces dont les petits ne sont de long-temps en état d’aller chercher eux-mêmes leur nourriture; et si l’enfance est plus longue parmi nous, la vie étant plus longue aussi, tout est encore à peu près égal en ce point (Note 7); quoiqu’il y ait sur la durée du premier âge, et sur le nombre des petits (Note 8), d’autres règles qui ne sont pas de mon sujet. Chez les vieillards, qui agissent et transpirent peu, le besoin d’aliments diminue avec la faculté d’y pourvoir; et comme la vie sauvage éloigne d’eux la goutte et les rhumatismes, et que la vieillesse est de tous les maux celui que les secours humains peuvent le moins soulager, ils s’éteignent enfin, sans qu’on s’aperçoive qu’ils cessent d’être, et presque sans s’en apercevoir eux-mêmes. À l’égard des maladies, je ne répèterai point les vaines et fausses déclamations que font contre la médecine la plupart des gens en santé; mais je demanderai s’il y a quelque observation solide de laquelle on puisse conclure que, dans les pays où cet art est le plus négligé, la vie moyenne de l’homme soit plus courte que dans ceux où il est cultivé avec le plus de soin. Et comment cela pourrait-il être, si nous nous donnons plus de maux que la médecine ne peut nous fournir de remèdes? L’extrême inégalité dans la manière de vivre, l’excès d’oisiveté dans les uns, l’excès de travail dans les autres, la facilité d’irriter et de satisfaire nos appétits et notre sensualité, les aliments trop recherchés des riches, qui les nourrissent de sucs échauffants et les accablent d’indigestions, la mauvaise nourriture des pauvres, dont ils manquent même le plus souvent, et dont le défaut les porte à surcharger avidement leur estomac dans l’occasion, les veilles, les excès de toute espèce, les transports immodérés de toutes les passions, les fatigues et l’épuisement d’esprit, les chagrins et les peines sans nombre qu’on éprouve dans tous les états, et dont les âmes sont perpétuellement rongées: voilà les funestes garants que la plupart de nos maux sont notre propre ouvrage, et que nous les aurions presque tous évités en conservant la manière de vivre simple, uniforme, et solitaire, qui nous était prescrite par la nature. Si elle nous a destinés à être sains, j’ose presque assurer que l’état de réflexion est un état contre nature, et que l’homme qui médite est un animal dépravé. Quand on songe à la bonne constitution des sauvages, au moins de ceux que nous n’avons pas perdus avec nos liqueurs fortes; quand on sait qu’ils ne connaissent presque d’autres maladies que les blessures et la vieillesse, on est très-porté à croire qu’on ferait aisément l’histoire des maladies humaines en suivant celle des sociétés civiles. C’est au moins l’avis de Platon, qui juge, sur certains remèdes employés ou approuvés par Podalyre et Macaon au siége de Troie, que diverses maladies que ces remèdes devaient exciter n’étaient point encore alors connues parmi les hommes; et Celse rapporte que la diète, aujourd'hui si nécessaire, ne fut inventée que par Hippocrate.\n\nAvec si peu de sources de maux, l’homme dans l’état de nature n’a donc guère besoin de remèdes, moins encore de médecins; l’espèce humaine n’est point non plus à cet égard de pire condition que toutes les autres, et il est aisé de savoir des chasseurs si dans leurs courses ils trouvent beaucoup d’animaux infirmes. Plusieurs en trouvent qui ont reçu des blessures considérables très-bien cicatrisées, qui ont eu des os et même des membres rompus, et repris sans autre chirurgien que le temps, sans autre régime que leur vie ordinaire, et qui n’en sont pas moins parfaitement guéris pour n’avoir point été tourmentés d’incisions, empoisonnés de drogues, ni exténués de jeûnes. Enfin, quelque utile que puisse être parmi nous la médecine bien administrée, il est toujours certain que si le sauvage malade, abandonné à lui-même, n’a rien à espérer que de la nature, en revanche il n’a rien à craindre que de son mal; ce qui rend souvent sa situation préférable à la nôtre. Gardons-nous donc de confondre l’homme sauvage avec les hommes que nous avons sous les yeux. La nature traite tous les animaux abandonnés à ses soins avec une prédilection qui semble montrer combien elle est jalouse de ce droit. Le cheval, le chat, le taureau, l’âne même, ont la plupart une taille plus haute, tous une constitution plus robuste, plus de vigueur, de force, et de courage, dans les forêts que dans nos maisons: ils perdent la moitié de ces avantages en devenant domestiques, et l’on dirait que tous nos soins à bien traiter et nourrir ces animaux n’aboutissent qu’à les abâtardir. Il en est ainsi de l’homme même: en devenant sociable et esclave il devient faible, craintif, rampant; et sa manière de vivre molle et efféminée achève d’énerver à la fois sa force et son courage. Ajoutons qu’entre les conditions sauvage et domestique la différence d’homme à homme doit être plus grande encore que celle de bête à bête: car l’animal et l’homme ayant été traités également par la nature, toutes les commodités que l’homme se donne de plus qu’aux animaux qu’il apprivoise sont autant de causes particulières qui le font dégénérer plus sensiblement.\n\nCe n’est donc pas un si grand malheur à ces premiers hommes, ni surtout un si grand obstacle à leur conservation, que la nudité, le défaut d’habitation, et la privation de toutes ces inutilités que nous croyons si nécessaires. S’ils n’ont pas la peau velue, ils n’en ont aucun besoin dans les pays chauds; et ils savent bientôt, dans les pays froids, s’approprier celles des bêtes qu’ils ont vaincues: s’ils n’ont que deux pieds pour courir, ils ont deux bras pour pourvoir à leur défense et à leurs besoins. Leurs enfants marchent peut-être tard et avec peine, mais les mères les portent avec facilité; avantage qui manque aux autres espèces, où la mère, étant poursuivie, se voit contrainte d’abandonner ses petits ou de régler son pas sur le leur. Enfin, à moins de supposer ces concours singuliers et fortuits de circonstances dont je parlerai dans la suite, et qui pouvaient fort bien ne jamais arriver, il est clair, en tout état de cause, que le premier qui se fit des habits ou un logement se donna en cela des choses peu nécessaires, puisqu’il s’en était passé jusqu’alors, et qu’on ne voit pas pourquoi il n’eût pu supporter, homme fait, un genre de vie qu’il supportait dès son enfance.\n\nSeul, oisif, et toujours voisin du danger, l’homme sauvage doit aimer à dormir, et avoir le sommeil léger, comme les animaux, qui, pensant peu, dorment, pour ainsi dire, tout le temps qu’ils ne pensent point. Sa propre conservation faisant presque son unique soin, ses facultés les plus exercées doivent être celles qui ont pour objet principal l’attaque et la défense, soit pour subjuguer sa proie, soit pour se garantir d’être celle d’un autre animal; au contraire, les organes qui ne se perfectionnent que par la mollesse et la sensualité doivent rester dans un état de grossièreté qui exclut en lui toute espèce de délicatesse; et ses sens se trouvant partagés sur ce point, il aura le toucher et le goût d’une rudesse extrême, la vue, l’ouïe et l’odorat, de la plus grande subtilité. Tel est l’état animal en général, et c’est aussi, selon le rapport des voyageurs, celui de la plupart des peuples sauvages. Ainsi il ne faut point s’étonner que les Hottentots du cap de Bonne-Espérance découvrent à la simple vue des vaisseaux en haute mer d’aussi loin que les Hollandais avec des lunettes; ni que les sauvages de l’Amérique sentissent les Espagnols à la piste comme auraient pu faire les meilleurs chiens; ni que toutes ces nations barbares supportent sans peine leur nudité, aiguisent leur goût à force de piment, et boivent les liqueurs européennes comme de l’eau.\n\nJe n’ai considéré jusqu’ici que l’homme physique; tâchons de le regarder maintenant par le côté métaphysique et moral.\n\nJe ne vois dans tout animal qu’une machine ingénieuse, à qui la nature a donné des sens pour se remonter elle-même, et pour se garantir, jusqu’à un certain point, de tout ce qui tend à la détruire ou à la déranger. J’aperçois précisément les mêmes choses dans la machine humaine, avec cette différence que la nature seule fait tout dans les opérations de la bête, au lieu que l’homme concourt aux siennes en qualité d’agent libre. L’une choisit ou rejette par instinct, et l’autre par un acte de liberté; ce qui fait que la bête ne peut s’écarter de la règle qui lui est prescrite, même quand il lui serait avantageux de le faire, et que l’homme s’en écarte souvent à son préjudice. C’est ainsi qu’un pigeon mourrait de faim près d’un bassin rempli des meilleures viandes, et un chat sur des tas de fruits ou de grains, quoique l’un et l’autre pût très-bien se nourrir de l’aliment qu’il dédaigne, s’il s’était avisé d’en essayer; c’est ainsi que les hommes dissolus se livrent à des excès qui leur causent la fièvre et la mort, parce que l’esprit déprave les sens, et que la volonté parle encore quand la nature se tait.\n\nTout animal a des idées, puisqu’il a des sens; il combine même ses idées jusqu’à un certain point: et l’homme ne diffère à cet égard de la bête que du plus au moins; Quelques philosophes ont même avancé qu’il y a plus de différence de tel homme à tel homme, que de tel homme à telle bête. Ce n’est donc pas tant l’entendement qui fait parmi les animaux la distinction spécifique de l’homme, que sa qualité d’agent libre. La nature commande à tout animal, et la bête obéit. L’homme éprouve la même impression, mais il se reconnaît libre d’acquiescer, ou de résister; et c’est surtout dans la conscience de cette liberté que se montre la spiritualité de son âme: car la physique explique en quelque manière le mécanisme des sens et la formation des idées; mais dans la puissance de vouloir ou plutôt de choisir, et dans le sentiment de cette puissance on ne trouve que des actes purement spirituels, dont on n’explique rien par les lois de la mécanique.\n\nMais, quand les difficultés qui environnent toutes ces questions laisseraient quelque lieu de disputer sur cette différence de l’homme et de l’animal, il y a une autre qualité très spécifique qui les distingue, et sur laquelle il ne peut y avoir de contestation; c’est la faculté de se perfectionner; faculté qui, à l’aide des circonstances, développe successivement toutes les autres, et réside parmi nous tant dans l’espèce que dans l’individu, au lieu qu’un animal est, au bout de quelques mois, ce qu’il sera toute sa vie, et son espèce, au bout de mille ans, ce qu’elle était la première année de ces mille ans. Pourquoi l’homme seul est-il sujet à devenir imbécile? N’est-ce point qu’il retourne ainsi dans son état primitif, et que, tandis que la bête, qui n’a rien acquis et qui n’a rien non plus à perdre, reste toujours avec son instinct, l’homme, reperdant par la vieillesse ou d’autres accidents tout ce que sa perfectibilité lui avait fait acquérir, retombe ainsi plus bas que la bête même? Il serait triste pour nous d’être forcés de convenir que cette faculté distinctive et presque illimitée, est la source de tous les malheurs de l’homme; que c’est elle qui le tire, à force de temps, de cette condition originaire, dans laquelle il coulerait des jours tranquilles et innocents; que c’est elle qui, faisant éclore avec les siècles ses lumières et ses erreurs, ses vices et ses vertus, le rend à la longue le tyran de lui-même et de la nature (Note 9)? Il serait affreux d’être obligés de louer comme un être bienfaisant celui qui le premier suggéra à l’habitant des rives de l’Orénoque l’usage de ces ais qu’il applique sur les tempes de ses enfants, et qui leur assurent du moins une partie de leur imbécillité, et de leur bonheur originel.\n\nL’homme sauvage, livré par la nature au seul instinct, ou plutôt dédommagé de celui qui lui manque peut-être, par des facultés capables d’y suppléer d’abord, et de l’élever ensuite fort au-dessus de celle-là, commencera donc par les fonctions purement animales (Note 10). Apercevoir et sentir sera son premier état, qui lui sera commun avec tous les animaux; vouloir et ne pas vouloir; désirer et craindre, seront les premières, et presque les seules opérations de son âme, jusqu’à ce que de nouvelles circonstances y causent de nouveaux développements.\n\nQuoi qu’en disent les moralistes, l’entendement humain doit beaucoup aux passions, qui, d’un commun aveu, lui doivent beaucoup aussi: c’est par leur activité que notre raison se perfectionne; nous ne cherchons à connaître que parce que nous désirons de jouir; et il n’est pas possible de concevoir pourquoi celui qui n’aurait ni désirs ni craintes se donnerait la peine de raisonner. Les passions, à leur tour, tirent leur origine de nos besoins, et leur progrès de nos connaissances; car on ne peut désirer ou craindre les choses que sur les idées qu’on en peut avoir, ou par la simple impulsion de la nature; et l’homme sauvage, privé de toute sorte de lumières, n’éprouve que les passions de cette dernière espèce; ses désirs ne passent pas ses besoins physiques (Note 11); les seuls biens, qu’il connaisse dans l’univers sont la nourriture, une femelle et le repos; les seuls maux qu’il craigne sont la douleur et la faim; je dis la douleur et non la mort; car jamais l’animal ne saura ce que c’est que mourir, et la connaissance de la mort, et de ses terreurs, est une des premières acquisitions que l’homme ait faites, en s’éloignant de la condition animale.\n\n### Part One, 3\n\nIl me serait aisé, si cela m’était nécessaire, d’appuyer ce sentiment par les faits, et de faire voir que chez toutes les nations du monde, les progrès de l’esprit se sont précisément proportionnés aux besoins que les peuples avaient reçus de la nature, ou auxquels les circonstances les avaient assujettis, et par conséquent aux passions, qui les portaient à pourvoir à ces besoins. Je montrerais en Égypte les arts naissants, et s’étendant avec les débordements du Nil; je suivrais leur progrès chez les Grecs, où l’on les vit germer, croître, et s’élever jusqu’aux cieux parmi les sables et les rochers de l’Attique, sans pouvoir prendre racine sur les bords fertiles de l’Eurotas; je remarquerais qu’en général les peuples du Nord sont plus industrieux que ceux du Midi, parce qu’ils peuvent moins se passer de l’être, comme si la nature voulait ainsi égaliser les choses, en donnant aux esprits la fertilité qu’elle refuse à la terre.\n\nMais sans recourir aux témoignages incertains de l’histoire, qui ne voit que tout semble éloigner de l’homme sauvage la tentation et les moyens de cesser de l’être? Son imagination ne lui peint rien; son cœur ne lui demande rien. Ses modiques besoins se trouvent si aisément sous la main, et il est si loin du degré de connaissances nécessaires pour désirer d’en acquérir de plus grandes qu’il ne peut avoir ni prévoyance, ni curiosité. Le spectacle de la nature lui devient indifférent, à force de lui devenir familier: c’est toujours le même ordre, ce sont toujours les mêmes révolutions; il n’a pas l’esprit de s’étonner des plus grandes merveilles; et ce n’est pas chez lui qu’il faut chercher la philosophie dont l’homme a besoin, pour savoir observer une fois ce qu’il a vu tous les jours. Son âme, que rien n’agite, se livre au seul sentiment de son existence actuelle, sans aucune idée de l’avenir, quelque prochain qu’il puisse être, et ses projets, bornés comme ses vues, s’étendent à peine jusqu’à la fin de la journée. Tel est encore aujourd’hui le degré de prévoyance du Caraïbe: il vend le matin son lit de coton, et vient pleurer le soir pour le racheter, faute d’avoir prévu qu’il en aurait besoin pour la nuit prochaine.\n\nPlus on médite sur ce sujet, plus la distance des pures sensations aux plus simples connaissances s’agrandit à nos regards; et il est impossible de concevoir comment un homme aurait pu par ses seules forces, sans le secours de la communication, et sans l’aiguillon de la nécessité, franchir un si grand intervalle. Combien de siècles se sont peut-être écoulés, avant que les hommes aient été à portée de voir d’autre feu que celui du ciel! combien ne leur a-t-il pas fallu de différents hasards pour apprendre les usages les plus communs de cet élément! combien de fois ne l’ont-ils pas laissé éteindre, avant que d’avoir acquis l’art de le reproduire! et combien de fois peut-être chacun de ces secrets n’est-il pas mort avec celui qui l’avait découvert! Que dirons-nous de l’agriculture, art qui demande tant de travail et de prévoyance, qui tient à d’autres arts, qui très évidemment n’est praticable que dans une société au moins commencée, et qui ne nous sert pas tant à tirer de la terre des aliments qu’elle fournirait bien sans cela qu’à la forcer aux préférences qui sont le plus de notre goût! Mais supposons que les hommes eussent tellement multiplié que les productions naturelles n’eussent plus suffi pour les nourrir, supposition qui, pour le dire en passant, montrerait un grand avantage pour l’espèce humaine dans cette manière de vivre; supposons que, sans forges, et sans ateliers, les instruments du  labourage fussent tombés du ciel entre les mains des sauvages; que ces hommes eussent vaincu la haine mortelle qu’ils ont tous pour un travail continu; qu’ils eussent appris à prévoir de si loin leurs besoins, qu’ils eussent deviné comment il faut cultiver la terre, semer les grains, et planter les arbres; qu’ils eussent trouvé l’art de moudre le blé, et de mettre le raisin en fermentation; toutes choses qu’il leur a fallu faire enseigner par les dieux, faute de concevoir comment ils les auraient apprises d’eux-mêmes: quel serait après cela, l’homme assez insensé pour se tourmenter à la culture d’un champ qui sera dépouillé par le premier venu, homme ou bête indifféremment, à qui cette moisson conviendra? et comment chacun pourra-t-il se résoudre à passer sa vie à un travail pénible, dont il est d’autant plus sûr de ne pas recueillir le prix qu’il lui sera plus nécessaire? En un mot, comment cette situation pourra-t-elle porter les hommes à cultiver la terre, tant qu’elle ne sera point partagée entre eux, c’est-à-dire tant que l’état de nature ne sera point anéanti?\n\nQuand nous voudrions supposer un homme sauvage aussi habile dans l’art de penser que nous le font nos philosophes; quand nous en ferions, à leur exemple, un philosophe lui-même, découvrant seul les plus sublimes vérités, se faisant par des suites de raisonnements très-abstraits des maximes de justice et de raison tirées de l’amour de l’ordre en général, ou de la volonté connue de son créateur; en un mot, quand nous lui supposerions dans l’esprit autant d’intelligence et de lumières qu’il doit avoir, et qu’on lui trouve en effet de pesanteur et de stupidité, quelle utilité retirerait l’espèce de toute cette métaphysique, qui ne pourrait se communiquer et qui périrait avec l’individu qui l’aurait inventée? quel progrès pourrait faire le genre humain épars dans les bois parmi les animaux? et jusqu’à quel point pourraient se perfectionner, et s’éclairer mutuellement des hommes qui, n’ayant ni domicile fixe ni aucun besoin l’un de l’autre, se rencontreraient, peut-être à peine deux fois en leur vie, sans se connaître, et sans se parler?\n\nQu’on songe de combien d’idées nous sommes redevables à l’usage de la parole; combien la grammaire exerce et facilite les opérations de l’esprit; et qu’on pense aux peines inconcevables, et au temps infini qu’a dû coûter la première invention des langues: qu’on joigne ces réflexions aux précédentes, et l’on jugera combien il eût fallu de milliers de siècles, pour développer successivement dans l’esprit humain les opérations dont il était capable.\n\nQu’il me soit permis de considérer un instant les embarras de l’origine des langues. Je pourrais me contenter de citer ou de répéter ici les recherches que M. l’Abbé de Condillac a faites sur cette matière, qui toutes confirment pleinement mon sentiment, et qui, peut-être, m’en ont donné la première idée. Mais la manière dont ce philosophe résout les difficultés qu’il se fait à lui-même sur l’origine des signes institués, montrant qu’il a supposé ce que je mets en question, savoir une sorte de société déjà établie entre les inventeurs du langage, je crois en renvoyant à ses réflexions devoir y joindre les miennes pour exposer les mêmes difficultés dans le jour qui convient à mon sujet. La première qui se présente est d’imaginer comment elles purent devenir nécessaires; car les hommes n’ayant nulle correspondance entre eux, ni aucun besoin d’en avoir, on ne conçoit ni la nécessité de cette invention, ni sa possibilité, si elle ne fut pas indispensable. Je dirais bien, comme beaucoup d’autres, que les langues sont nées dans le commerce domestique des pères, des mères et des enfants: mais outre que cela ne résoudrait point les objections, ce serait commettre la faute de ceux qui raisonnant sur l’état de nature, y transportent les idées prises dans la société, voient toujours la famille rassemblée dans une même habitation, et ses membres gardant entre eux une union aussi intime et aussi permanente que parmi nous, où tant d’intérêts communs les réunissent; au lieu que dans cet état primitif, n’ayant ni maison, ni cabanes, ni propriété d’aucune espèce, chacun se logeait au hasard, et souvent pour une seule nuit; les mâles, et les femelles s’unissaient fortuitement selon la rencontre, l’occasion, et le désir, sans que la parole fût un interprète fort nécessaire des choses qu’ils avaient à se dire: ils se quittaient avec la même facilité (Note 12); la mère allaitait d’abord ses enfants pour son propre besoin; puis l’habitude les lui ayant rendus chers, elle les nourrissait ensuite pour le leur; sitôt qu’ils avaient la force de chercher leur pâture, ils ne tardaient pas à quitter la mère elle-même; et comme il n’y avait presque point d’autre moyen de se retrouver que de ne pas se perdre de vue, ils en étaient bientôt au point de ne pas même se reconnaître les uns les autres. Remarquez encore que l’enfant ayant tous ses besoins à expliquer, et par conséquent plus de choses à dire à la mère que la mère à l’enfant, c’est lui qui doit faire les plus grands frais de l’invention, et que la langue qu’il emploie doit être en grande partie son propre ouvrage; ce qui multiplie autant les langues qu’il y a d’individus pour les parler, à quoi contribue encore la vie errante et vagabonde qui ne laisse à aucun idiome le temps de prendre de la consistance; car de dire que la mère dicte à l’enfant les mots dont il devra se servir pour lui demander telle ou telle chose, cela montre bien comment on enseigne des langues déjà formées, mais cela n’apprend point comment elles se forment.\n\nSupposons cette première difficulté vaincue: franchissons pour un moment l’espace immense qui dut se trouver entre le pur état de nature et le besoin des langues; et cherchons, en les supposant nécessaires (Note 13), comment elles purent commencer à s’établir. Nouvelle difficulté pire encore que la précédente; car si les hommes ont eu besoin de la parole pour apprendre à penser, ils ont eu bien plus besoin encore de savoir penser pour trouver l’art de la parole; et quand on comprendrait comment les sons de la voix ont été pris pour les interprètes conventionnels de nos idées, il resterait toujours à savoir quels ont pu être les interprètes mêmes de cette convention pour les idées qui, n’ayant point un objet sensible, ne pouvaient s’indiquer ni par le geste, ni par la voix, de sorte qu’à peine peut-on former des conjectures supportables sur la naissance de cet art de communiquer ses pensées, et d’établir un commerce entre les esprits: art sublime qui est déjà si loin de son origine, mais que le philosophe voit encore à une si prodigieuse distance de sa perfection qu’il n’y a point d’homme assez hardi pour assurer qu’il y arriverait jamais, quand les révolutions que le temps amène nécessairement seraient suspendues en sa faveur, que les préjugés sortiraient des académies ou se tairaient devant elles, et qu’elles pourraient s’occuper de cet objet épineux, durant des siècles entiers sans interruption.\n\nLe premier langage de l’homme, le langage le plus universel, le plus énergique, et le seul dont il eut besoin, avant qu’il fallût persuader des hommes assemblés, est le cri de la nature. Comme ce cri n’était arraché que par une sorte d’instinct dans les occasions pressantes, pour implorer du secours dans les grands dangers, ou du soulagement dans les maux violents, il n’était pas d’un grand usage dans le cours ordinaire de la vie, où règnent des sentiments plus modérés. Quand les idées des hommes commencèrent à s’étendre et à se multiplier, et qu’il s’établit entre eux une communication plus étroite, ils cherchèrent des signes plus nombreux et un langage plus étendu: ils multiplièrent les inflexions de la voix, et y joignirent les gestes, qui, par leur nature, sont plus expressifs, et dont le sens dépend moins d’une détermination antérieure. Ils exprimaient donc les objets visibles et mobiles par des gestes, et ceux qui frappent l’ouïe, par des sons imitatifs: mais comme le geste n’indique guère que les objets présents, ou faciles à décrire, et les actions visibles; qu’il n’est pas d’un usage universel, puisque l’obscurité, ou l’interposition d’un corps le rendent inutile, et qu’il exige l’attention plutôt qu’il ne l’excite, on s’avisa enfin de lui substituer les articulations de la voix, qui, sans avoir le même rapport avec certaines idées, sont plus propres à les représenter toutes, comme signes institués; substitution qui ne put se faire que d’un commun consentement, et d’une manière assez difficile à pratiquer pour des hommes dont les organes grossiers n’avaient encore aucun exercice, et plus difficile encore à concevoir en elle-même, puisque cet accord unanime dut être motivé, et que la parole paraît avoir été fort nécessaire, pour établir l’usage de la parole.\n\nOn doit juger que les premiers mots, dont les hommes firent usage, eurent dans leur esprit une signification beaucoup plus étendue que n’ont ceux qu’on emploie dans les langues déjà formées, et qu’ignorant la division du discours en ses parties constitutives, ils donnèrent d’abord à chaque mot le sens d’une proposition entière. Quand ils commencèrent à distinguer le sujet d’avec l’attribut, et le verbe d’avec le nom, ce qui ne fut pas un médiocre effort de génie, les substantifs ne furent d’abord qu’autant de noms propres, l’infinitif fut le seul temps des verbes, et à l’égard des adjectifs la notion ne s’en dut développer que fort difficilement, parce que tout adjectif est un mot abstrait, et que les abstractions sont des opérations pénibles, et peu naturelles. Chaque objet reçut d’abord un nom particulier, sans égard aux genres, et aux espèces, que ces premiers instituteurs n’étaient pas en état de distinguer; et tous les individus se présentèrent isolés à leur esprit, comme ils le sont dans le tableau de la nature. Si un chêne s’appelait A, un autre chêne s’appelait B: de sorte que plus les connaissances étaient bornées, et plus le dictionnaire devint étendu. L’embarras de toute cette nomenclature ne put être levé facilement: car pour ranger les êtres sous des dénominations communes, et génériques, il en fallait connaître les propriétés et les différences; il fallait des observations, et des définitions, c’est-à-dire, de l’histoire naturelle et de la métaphysique, beaucoup plus que les hommes de ce temps-là n’en pouvaient avoir.\n\n### Part One, 4\n\nD’ailleurs, les idées générales ne peuvent s’introduire dans l’esprit qu’à l’aide des mots, et l’entendement ne les saisit que par des propositions. C’est une des raisons pour quoi les animaux ne sauraient se former de telles idées, ni jamais acquérir la perfectibilité qui en dépend. Quand un singe va sans hésiter d’une noix à l’autre, pense-t-on qu’il ait l’idée générale de cette sorte de fruit, et qu’il compare son archétype à ces deux individus? Non sans doute; mais la vue de l’une de ces noix rappelle à sa mémoire les sensations qu’il a reçues de l’autre, et ses yeux, modifiés d’une certaine manière, annoncent à son goût la modification qu’il va recevoir. Toute idée générale est purement intellectuelle; pour peu que l’imagination s’en mêle, l’idée devient aussitôt particulière. Essayez de vous tracer l’image d’un arbre en général, jamais vous n’en viendrez à bout, malgré vous il faudra le voir petit ou grand, rare ou touffu, clair ou foncé, et s’il dépendait de vous de n’y voir que ce qui se trouve en tout arbre, cette image ne ressemblerait plus à un arbre. Les êtres purement abstraits se voient de même, ou ne se conçoivent que par le discours. La définition seule du triangle vous en donne la véritable idée: sitôt que vous en figurez un dans votre esprit, c’est un tel triangle et non pas un autre, et vous ne pouvez éviter d’en rendre les lignes sensibles ou le plan coloré. Il faut donc énoncer des propositions, il faut donc parler pour avoir des idées générales; car sitôt que l’imagination s’arrête, l’esprit ne marche plus qu’à l’aide du discours. Si donc les premiers inventeurs n’ont pu donner des noms qu’aux idées qu’ils avaient déjà, il s’ensuit que les premiers substantifs n’ont pu jamais être que des noms propres.\n\nMais lorsque, par des moyens que je ne conçois pas, nos nouveaux grammairiens commencèrent à étendre leurs idées et à généraliser leurs mots, l’ignorance des inventeurs dut assujettir cette méthode à des bornes fort étroites; et comme ils avaient d’abord trop multiplié les noms des individus faute de connaître les genres et les espèces, ils firent ensuite trop peu d’espèces et de genres faute d’avoir considéré les êtres par toutes leurs différences. Pour pousser les divisions assez loin, il eût fallu plus d’expérience et de lumière qu’ils n’en pouvaient avoir, et plus de recherches et de travail qu’ils n’y en voulaient employer. Or si, même aujourd’hui, l’on découvre chaque jour de nouvelles espèces qui avaient échappé jusqu’ici à toutes nos observations, qu’on pense combien il dut s’en dérober à des hommes qui ne jugeaient des choses que sur le premier aspect! Quant aux classes primitives et aux notions les plus générales, il est superflu d’ajouter qu’elles durent leur échapper encore: comment, par exemple, auraient-ils imaginé ou entendu les mots de matière, d’esprit, de substance, de mode, de figure, de mouvement, puisque nos philosophes qui s’en servent depuis si longtemps ont bien de la peine à les entendre eux-mêmes, et que les idées qu’on attache à ces mots étant purement métaphysiques, ils n’en trouvaient aucun modèle dans la nature? Je m’arrête à ces premiers pas, et je supplie mes juges de suspendre ici leur lecture; pour considérer, sur l’invention des seuls substantifs physiques, c’est-à-dire, sur la partie de la langue la plus facile à trouver, le chemin qui lui reste à faire, pour exprimer toutes les pensées des hommes, pour prendre une forme constante, pouvoir être parlée en public, et influer sur la société. Je les supplie de réfléchir à ce qu’il a fallu de temps et de connaissances pour trouver les nombres (Note 14), les mots abstraits, les aoristes, et tous les temps des verbes, les particules, la syntaxe, lier les propositions, les raisonnements, et former toute la logique du discours. Quant à moi, effrayé des difficultés qui se multiplient, et convaincu de l’impossibilité presque démontrée que les langues aient pu naître et s’établir par des moyens purement humains, je laisse à qui voudra l’entreprendre la discussion de ce difficile problème, lequel a été le plus nécessaire, de la société déjà liée, à l’institution des langues, ou des langues déjà inventées, à l’établissement de la société.\n\nQuoi qu’il en soit de ces origines, on voit du moins, au peu de soin qu’a pris la nature de rapprocher les hommes par des besoins mutuels, et de leur faciliter l’usage de la parole, combien elle a peu préparé leur sociabilité, et combien elle a peu mis du sien dans tout ce qu’ils ont fait, pour en établir les liens. En effet, il est impossible d’imaginer pourquoi, dans cet état primitif, un homme aurait plutôt besoin d’un autre homme qu’un singe ou un loup de son semblable, ni, ce besoin supposé, quel motif pourrait engager l’autre à y pourvoir, ni même, en ce dernier cas, comment ils pourraient convenir entre eux des conditions. Je sais qu’on nous répète sans cesse que rien n’eût été si misérable que l’homme dans cet état; et s’il est vrai, comme je crois l’avoir prouvé, qu’il n’eût pu qu’après bien des siècles avoir le désir et l’occasion d’en sortir, ce serait un procès à faire à la nature, et non à celui qu’elle aurait ainsi constitué. Mais, si j’entends bien ce terme de misérable, c’est un mot qui n’a aucun sens, ou qui ne signifie qu’une privation douloureuse et la souffrance du corps ou de l’âme. Or je voudrais bien qu’on m’expliquât quel peut être le genre de misère d’un être libre dont le coeur est en paix et le corps en santé. Je demande laquelle, de la vie civile ou naturelle, est la plus sujette à devenir insupportable à ceux qui en jouissent? Nous ne voyons presque autour de nous que des gens qui se plaignent de leur existence, plusieurs même qui s’en privent autant qu’il est en eux, et la réunion des lois divine et humaine suffit à peine pour arrêter ce désordre. Je demande si jamais on a ouï dire qu’un sauvage en liberté ait seulement songé à se plaindre de la vie et à se donner la mort? Qu’on juge donc avec moins d’orgueil de quel côté est la véritable misère. Rien au contraire n’eût été si misérable que l’homme sauvage, ébloui par des lumières, tourmenté par des passions, et raisonnant sur un état différent du sien. Ce fut par une providence très sage, que les facultés qu’il avait en puissance ne devaient se développer qu’avec les occasions de les exercer, afin qu’elles ne lui fussent ni superflues et à charge avant le temps, ni tardives, et inutiles au besoin. Il avait dans le seul instinct tout ce qu’il fallait pour vivre dans l’état de nature, il n’a dans une raison cultivée que ce qu’il lui faut pour vivre en société.\n\nIl paraît d’abord que les hommes dans cet état n’ayant entre eux aucune sorte de relation morale, ni de devoirs connus, ne pouvaient être ni bons ni méchants, et n’avaient ni vices ni vertus, à moins que, prenant ces mots dans un sens physique, on n’appelle vices dans l’individu les qualités qui peuvent nuire à sa propre conservation, et vertus celles qui peuvent y contribuer; auquel cas, il faudrait appeler le plus vertueux celui qui résisterait le moins aux simples impulsions de la nature. Mais sans nous écarter du sens ordinaire, il est à propos de suspendre le jugement que nous pourrions porter sur une telle situation, et de nous défier de nos préjugés, jusqu’à ce que, la balance à la main, on ait examiné s’il y a plus de vertus que de vices parmi les hommes civilisés, ou si leurs vertus sont plus avantageuses que leurs vices ne sont funestes, ou si le progrès de leurs connaissances est un dédommagement suffisant des maux qu’ils se font mutuellement, à mesure qu’ils s’instruisent du bien qu’ils devraient se faire, ou s’ils ne seraient pas, à tout prendre, dans une situation plus heureuse de n’avoir ni mal à craindre ni bien à espérer de personne que de s’être soumis à une dépendance universelle, et de s’obliger à tout recevoir de ceux qui ne s’obligent à leur rien donner.\n\nN’allons pas surtout conclure avec Hobbes que pour n’avoir aucune idée de la bonté, l’homme soit naturellement méchant, qu’il soit vicieux parce qu’il ne connaît pas la vertu, qu’il refuse toujours à ses semblables des services qu’il ne croit pas leur devoir, ni qu’en vertu du droit qu’il s’attribue avec raison aux choses dont il a besoin, il s’imagine follement être le seul propriétaire de tout l’univers. Hobbes a très bien vu le défaut de toutes les définitions modernes du droit naturel: mais les conséquences qu’il tire de la sienne montrent qu’il la prend dans un sens qui n’est pas moins faux. En raisonnant sur les principes qu’il établit, cet auteur devait dire que l’état de nature étant celui où le soin de notre conservation est le moins préjudiciable à celle d’autrui, cet état était par conséquent le plus propre à la paix, et le plus convenable au genre humain. Il dit précisément le contraire, pour avoir fait entrer mal à propos dans le soin de la conservation de l’homme sauvage le besoin de satisfaire une multitude de passions qui sont l’ouvrage de la société, et qui ont rendu les lois nécessaires. Le méchant, dit-il, est un enfant robuste; il reste à savoir si l’homme sauvage est un enfant robuste. Quand on le lui accorderait, qu’en conclurait-il? Que si, quand il est robuste, cet homme était aussi dépendant des autres que quand il est faible, il n’y a sorte d’excès auxquels il ne se portât, qu’il ne battît sa mère lorsqu’elle tarderait trop à lui donner la mamelle, qu’il n’étranglât un de ses jeunes frères lorsqu’il en serait incommodé, qu’il ne mordît la jambe à l’autre lorsqu’il en serait heurté ou troublé; mais ce sont deux suppositions contradictoires dans l’état de nature qu’être robuste et dépendant; l’homme est faible quand il est dépendant, et il est émancipé avant que d’être robuste. Hobbes n’a pas vu que la même cause qui empêche les sauvages d’user de leur raison, comme le prétendent nos jurisconsultes, les empêche en même temps d’abuser de leurs facultés, comme il le prétend lui-même; de sorte qu’on pourrait dire que les sauvages ne sont pas méchants précisément, parce qu’ils ne savent pas ce que c’est qu’être bons; car ce n’est ni le développement des lumières, ni le frein de la loi, mais le calme des passions, et l’ignorance du vice qui les empêche de mal faire; tanto plus in illis proficit vitiorum ignoratio, quàm in his cognitio virtutis. Il y a d’ailleurs un autre principe que Hobbes n’a point aperçu et qui, ayant été donné à l’homme pour adoucir, en certaines circonstances, la férocité de son amour-propre, ou le désir de se conserver avant la naissance de cet amour (Note 15), tempère l’ardeur qu’il a pour son bien-être par une répugnance innée à voir souffrir son semblable. Je ne crois pas avoir aucune contradiction à craindre, en accordant à l’homme la seule vertu naturelle, qu’ait été forcé de reconnaître le détracteur le plus outré des vertus humaines. Je parle de la pitié, disposition convenable à des êtres aussi faibles, et sujets à autant de maux que nous le sommes; vertu d’autant plus universelle et d’autant plus utile à l’homme qu’elle précède en lui l’usage de toute réflexion, et si naturelle que les bêtes mêmes en donnent quelquefois des signes sensibles. Sans parler de la tendresse des mères pour leurs petits, et des périls qu’elles bravent pour les en garantir, on observe tous les jours la répugnance qu’ont les chevaux à fouler aux pieds un corps vivant; un animal ne passe point sans inquiétude auprès d’un animal mort de son espèce; il y en a même qui leur donnent une sorte de sépulture; et les tristes mugissements du bétail entrant dans une boucherie annoncent l’impression qu’il reçoit de l’horrible spectacle qui le frappe. On voit avec plaisir l’auteur de la fable des Abeilles, forcé de reconnaître l’homme pour un être compatissant et sensible, sortir, dans l’exemple qu’il en donne, de son style froid et subtil, pour nous offrir la pathétique image d’un homme enfermé qui aperçoit au-dehors une bête féroce arrachant un enfant du sein de sa mère, brisant sous sa dent meurtrière les faibles membres, et déchirant de ses ongles les entrailles palpitantes de cet enfant. Quelle affreuse agitation n’éprouve point ce témoin d’un événement auquel il ne prend aucun intérêt personnel? Quelles angoisses ne souffre-t-il pas à cette vue, de ne pouvoir porter aucun secours à la mère évanouie, ni à l’enfant expirant?\n\nTel est le pur mouvement de la nature, antérieur à toute réflexion: telle est la force de la pitié naturelle, que les moeurs les plus dépravées ont encore peine à détruire, puisqu’on voit tous les jours dans nos spectacles s’attendrir et pleurer aux malheurs d’un infortuné tel, qui, s’il était à la place du tyran, aggraverait encore les tourments de son ennemi; semblable au sanguinaire Sylla, si sensible aux maux qu’il n’avait pas causés, ou à cet Alexandre de Phère qui n’osait assister à la représentation d’aucune tragédie, de peur qu’on ne le vît gémir avec Andromaque et Priam, tandis qu’il écoutait sans émotion les cris de tant de citoyens qu’on égorgeait tous les jours par ses ordres:\n\nMollissima corda Humano generi dare se natura fatetur, Quæ lacrymas dedit..\n\nMandeville a bien senti qu’avec toute leur morale les hommes n’eussent jamais été que des monstres, si la nature ne leur eût donné la pitié à l’appui de la raison: mais il n’a pas vu que de cette seule qualité découlent toutes les vertus sociales qu’il veut disputer aux hommes. En effet, qu’est-ce que la générosité, la clémence, l’humanité, sinon la pitié appliquée aux faibles, aux coupables, ou à l’espèce humaine en général? La bienveillance et l’amitié même sont, à le bien prendre, des productions d’une pitié constante, fixée sur un objet particulier: car désirer que quelqu’un ne souffre point, qu’est-ce autre chose que désirer qu’il soit heureux? Quand il serait vrai que la commisération ne serait qu’un sentiment qui nous met à la place de celui qui souffre, sentiment obscur et vif dans l’homme sauvage, développé, mais faible dans l’homme civil, qu’importerait cette idée à la vérité de ce que je dis, sinon de lui donner plus de force? En effet, la commisération sera d’autant plus énergique que l’animal spectateur s’identifiera intimement avec l’animal souffrant. Or il est évident que cette identification a dû être infiniment plus étroite dans l’état de nature que dans l’état de raisonnement. C’est la raison qui engendre l’amour-propre, et c’est la réflexion qui le fortifie; c’est elle qui replie l’homme sur lui-même; c’est elle qui le sépare de tout ce qui le gêne et l’afflige: c’est la philosophie qui l’isole; c’est par elle qu’il dit en secret, à l’aspect d’un homme souffrant: péris si tu veux, je suis en sûreté. Il n’y a plus que les dangers de la société entière qui troublent le sommeil tranquille du philosophe, et qui l’arrachent de son lit. On peut impunément égorger son semblable sous sa fenêtre; il n’a qu’à mettre ses mains sur ses oreilles et s’argumenter un peu pour empêcher la nature qui se révolte en lui de l’identifier avec celui qu’on assassine. L’homme sauvage n’a point cet admirable talent; et faute de sagesse et de raison, on le voit toujours se livrer étourdiment au premier sentiment de l’humanité. Dans les émeutes, dans les querelles des rues, la populace s’assemble, l’homme prudent s’éloigne: c’est la canaille, ce sont les femmes des halles, qui séparent les combattants, et qui empêchent les honnêtes gens de s’entr’égorger.\n\n### Part One, 5\n\nIl est donc certain que la pitié est un sentiment naturel, qui, modérant dans chaque individu l’activité de l’amour de soi-même, concourt à la conservation mutuelle de toute l’espèce. C’est elle qui nous porte sans réflexion au secours de ceux que nous voyons souffrir: c’est elle qui, dans l’état de nature, tient lieu de lois, de moeurs et de vertu, avec cet avantage que nul n’est tenté de désobéir à sa douce voix: c’est elle qui détournera tout sauvage robuste d’enlever à un faible enfant, ou à un vieillard infirme, sa subsistance acquise avec peine, si lui-même espère pouvoir trouver la sienne ailleurs; c’est elle qui, au lieu de cette maxime sublime de justice raisonnée: Fais à autrui comme tu veux qu’on te fasse, inspire à tous les hommes cette autre maxime de bonté naturelle bien moins parfaite, mais plus utile peut-être que la précédente: Fais ton bien avec le moindre mal d’autrui qu’il est possible. C’est, en un mot, dans ce sentiment naturel, plutôt que dans des arguments subtils, qu’il faut chercher la cause de la répugnance que tout homme éprouverait à mal faire, même indépendamment des maximes de l’éducation. Quoiqu’il puisse appartenir à Socrate, et aux esprits de sa trempe, d’acquérir de la vertu par raison, il y a longtemps que le genre humain ne serait plus, si sa conservation n’eût dépendu que des raisonnements de ceux qui le composent. Avec des passions si peu actives, et un frein si salutaire, les hommes plutôt farouches que méchants, et plus attentifs à se garantir du mal qu’ils pouvaient recevoir que tentés d’en faire à autrui, n’étaient pas sujets à des démêlés fort dangereux: comme ils n’avaient entre eux aucune espèce de commerce, qu’ils ne connaissaient par conséquent ni la vanité, ni la considération, ni l’estime, ni le mépris, qu’ils n’avaient pas la moindre notion du tien et du mien, ni aucune véritable idée de la justice, qu’ils regardaient les violences qu’ils pouvaient essuyer comme un mal facile à réparer, et non comme une injure qu’il faut punir, et qu’ils ne songeaient pas même à la vengeance si ce n’est peut-être machinalement et sur-le-champ, comme le chien qui mord la pierre qu’on lui jette, leurs disputes eussent eu rarement des suites sanglantes, si elles n’eussent point eu de sujet plus sensible que la pâture: mais j’en vois un plus dangereux, dont il me reste à parler.\n\nParmi les passions qui agitent le cœur de l’homme, il en est une ardente, impétueuse, qui rend un sexe nécessaire à l’autre, passion terrible qui brave tous les dangers, renverse tous les obstacles, et qui dans ses fureurs semble propre à détruire le genre humain qu’elle est destinée à conserver. Que deviendront les hommes en proie à cette rage effrénée et brutale, sans pudeur, sans retenue, et se disputant chaque jour leurs amours au prix de leur sang? Il faut convenir d’abord que plus les passions sont violentes, plus les lois sont nécessaires pour les contenir: mais outre que les désordres et les crimes que celles-ci causent tous les jours parmi nous montrent assez l’insuffisance des lois à cet égard, il serait encore bon d’examiner si ces désordres ne sont point nés avec les lois mêmes; car alors, quand elles seraient capables de les réprimer, ce serait bien le moins qu’on en dût exiger que d’arrêter un mal qui n’existerait point sans elles.\n\nCommençons par distinguer le moral du physique dans le sentiment de l’amour. Le physique est ce désir général qui porte un sexe à s’unir à l’autre; le moral est ce qui détermine ce désir et le fixe sur un seul objet exclusivement, ou qui du moins lui donne pour cet objet préféré un plus grand degré d’énergie. Or il est facile de voir que le moral de l’amour est un sentiment factice; né de l’usage de la société, et célébré par les femmes avec beaucoup d’habileté et de soin pour établir leur empire, et rendre dominant le sexe qui devrait obéir. Ce sentiment étant fondé sur certaines notions du mérite ou de la beauté qu’un sauvage n’est point en état d’avoir, et sur des comparaisons qu’il n’est point en état de faire, doit être presque nul pour lui. Car comme son esprit n’a pu se former des idées abstraites de régularité et de proportion, son coeur n’est point non plus susceptible des sentiments d’admiration et d’amour qui, même sans qu’on s’en aperçoive, naissent de l’application de ces idées; il écoute uniquement le tempérament qu’il a reçu de la nature, et non le goût qu’il n’a pu acquérir, et toute femme est bonne pour lui.\n\nBornés au seul physique de l’amour, et assez heureux pour ignorer ces préférences qui en irritent le sentiment et en augmentent les difficultés, les hommes doivent sentir moins fréquemment et moins vivement les ardeurs du tempérament et par conséquent avoir entre eux des disputes plus rares, et moins cruelles. L’imagination, qui fait tant de ravages parmi nous, ne parle point à des coeurs sauvages; chacun attend paisiblement l’impulsion de la nature, s’y livre sans choix, avec plus de plaisir que de fureur, et le besoin satisfait, tout le désir est éteint.\n\nC’est donc une chose incontestable que l’amour même, ainsi que toutes les autres passions, n’a acquis que dans la société cette ardeur impétueuse qui le rend si souvent funeste aux hommes, et il est d’autant plus ridicule de représenter les sauvages comme s’entr’égorgeant sans cesse pour assouvir leur brutalité, que cette opinion est directement contraire à l’expérience, et que les Caraïbes, celui de tous les peuples existants qui jusqu’ici s’est écarté le moins de l’état de nature, sont précisément les plus paisibles dans leurs amours, et les moins sujets à la jalousie, quoique vivant sous un climat brûlant qui semble toujours donner à ces passions une plus grande activité.\n\nÀ l’égard des inductions qu’on pourrait tirer dans plusieurs espèces d’animaux, des combats des mâles qui ensanglantent en tout temps nos basses-cours ou qui font retenir au printemps nos forêts de leurs cris en se disputant la femelle, il faut commencer par exclure toutes les espèces où la nature a manifestement établi dans la puissance relative des sexes d’autres rapports que parmi nous: ainsi les combats des coqs ne forment point une induction pour l’espèce humaine. Dans les espèces où la proportion est mieux observée, ces combats ne peuvent avoir pour causes que la rareté des femelles eu égard au nombre des mâles, ou les intervalles exclusifs durant lesquels la femelle refuse constamment l’approche du mâle, ce qui revient à la première cause; car si chaque femelle ne souffre le mâle que durant deux mois de l’année, c’est à cet égard comme si le nombre des femelles était moindre des cinq sixièmes. Or aucun de ces deux cas n’est applicable à l’espèce humaine où le nombre des femelles surpasse généralement celui des mâles, et où l’on n’a jamais observé que même parmi les sauvages les femelles aient, comme celles des autres espèces, des temps de chaleur et d’exclusion. De plus parmi plusieurs de ces animaux, toute l’espèce entrant à la fois en effervescence, il vient un moment terrible d’ardeur commune, de tumulte, de désordre, et de combat: moment qui n’a point lieu parmi l’espèce humaine où l’amour n’est jamais périodique. On ne peut donc pas conclure des combats de certains animaux pour la possession des femelles que la même chose arriverait à l’homme dans l’état de nature; et quand même on pourrait tirer cette conclusion, comme ces dissensions ne détruisent point les autres espèces, on doit penser au moins qu’elles ne seraient pas plus funestes à la nôtre, et il est très apparent qu’elles y causeraient encore moins de ravage qu’elles ne font dans la société, surtout dans les pays où les moeurs étant encore comptées pour quelque chose, la jalousie des amants et la vengeance des époux causent chaque jour des duels, des meurtres, et pis encore; où le devoir d’une éternelle fidélité ne sert qu’à faire des adultères, et où les lois mêmes de la continence et de l’honneur étendent nécessairement la débauche, et multiplient les avortements.\n\nConcluons qu’errant dans les forêts sans industrie, sans parole, sans domicile, sans guerre, et sans liaisons, sans nul besoin de ses semblables, comme sans nul désir de leur nuire, peut-être même sans jamais en reconnaître aucun individuellement, l’homme sauvage sujet à peu de passions, et se suffisant à lui-même, n’avait que les sentiments et les lumières propres à cet état, qu’il ne sentait que ses vrais besoins, ne regardait que ce qu’il croyait avoir intérêt de voir, et que son intelligence ne faisait pas plus de progrès que sa vanité. Si par hasard il faisait quelque découverte, il pouvait d’autant moins la communiquer qu’il ne reconnaissait pas même ses enfants. L’art périssait avec l’inventeur; il n’y avait ni éducation ni progrès, les générations se multipliaient inutilement; et chacune partant toujours du même point, les siècles s’écoulaient dans toute la grossièreté des premiers âges, l’espèce était déjà vieille, et l’homme restait toujours enfant.\n\nSi je me suis étendu si longtemps sur la supposition de cette condition primitive, c’est qu’ayant d’anciennes erreurs et des préjugés invétérés à détruire, j’ai cru devoir creuser jusqu’à la racine, et montrer dans le tableau du véritable état de nature combien l’inégalité, même naturelle, est loin d’avoir dans cet état autant de réalité et d’influence que le prétendent nos écrivains. En effet, il est aisé de voir qu’entre les différences qui distinguent les hommes, plusieurs passent pour naturelles qui sont uniquement l’ouvrage de l’habitude et des divers genres de vie que les hommes adoptent dans la société. Ainsi un tempérament robuste ou délicat, la force ou la faiblesse qui en dépendent, viennent souvent plus de la manière dure ou efféminée dont on a été élevé que de la constitution primitive des corps. Il en est de même des forces de l’esprit, et non seulement l’éducation met la différence entre les esprits cultivés et ceux qui ne le sont pas, mais elle augmente celle qui se trouve entre les premiers à proportion de la culture; car qu’un géant et un nain marchent sur la même route, chaque pas qu’ils feront l’un et l’autre donnera un nouvel avantage au géant. Or si l’on compare la diversité prodigieuse d’éducations et de genres de vie qui règne dans les différents ordres de l’état civil, avec la simplicité et l’uniformité de la vie animale et sauvage, où tous se nourrissent des mêmes aliments, vivent de la même manière, et font exactement les mêmes choses, on comprendra combien la différence d’homme à homme doit être moindre dans l’état de nature que dans celui de société, et combien l’inégalité naturelle doit augmenter dans l’espèce humaine par l’inégalité d’institution.\n\nMais quand la nature affecterait dans la distribution de ses dons autant de préférences qu’on le prétend, quel avantage les plus favorisés en tireraient-ils, au préjudice des autres, dans un état de choses qui n’admettrait presque aucune sorte de relation entre eux? Là où il n’y a point d’amour, de quoi servira la beauté? Que sert l’esprit à des gens qui ne parlent point, et la ruse à ceux qui n’ont point d’affaires? J’entends toujours répéter que les plus forts opprimeront les faibles; mais qu’on m’explique ce qu’on veut dire par ce mot d’oppression. Les uns domineront avec violence, les autres gémiront asservis à tous leurs caprices: voilà précisément ce que j’observe parmi nous, mais je ne vois pas comment cela pourrait se dire des hommes sauvages, à qui l’on aurait même bien de la peine à faire entendre ce que c’est que servitude et domination. Un homme pourra bien s’emparer des fruits qu’un autre a cueillis, du gibier qu’il a tué, de l’antre qui lui servait l’asile; mais comment viendra-t-il jamais à bout de s’en faire obéir, et quelles pourront être les chaînes de la dépendance parmi des hommes qui ne possèdent rien? Si l’on me chasse d’un arbre, j’en suis quitte pour aller à un autre; si l’on me tourmente dans un lieu, qui m’empêchera de passer ailleurs? Se trouve-t-il un homme d’une force assez supérieure à la mienne, et, de plus, assez dépravé, assez paresseux, et assez féroce pour me contraindre à pourvoir à sa subsistance pendant qu’il demeure oisif? Il faut qu’il se résolve à ne pas me perdre de vue un seul instant, à me tenir lié avec un très grand soin durant son sommeil, de peur que je ne m’échappe ou que je ne le tue: c’est-à-dire qu’il est obligé de s’exposer volontairement à une peine beaucoup plus grande que celle qu’il veut éviter, et que celle qu’il me donne à moi-même. Après tout cela, sa vigilance se relâche-t-elle un moment? Un bruit imprévu lui fait-il détourner la tête? Je fais vingt pas dans la forêt, mes fers sont brisés, et il ne me revoit de sa vie.\n\nSans prolonger inutilement ces détails, chacun doit voir que, les liens de la servitude n’étant formés que de la dépendance mutuelle des hommes et des besoins réciproques qui les unissent, il est impossible d’asservir un homme sans l’avoir mis auparavant dans le cas de ne pouvoir se passer d’un autre; situation qui n’existant pas dans l’état de nature, y laisse chacun libre du joug et rend vaine la loi du plus fort.\n\nAprès avoir prouvé que l’inégalité est à peine sensible dans l’état de nature, et que son influence y est presque nulle, il me reste à montrer son origine, et ses progrès dans les développements successifs de l’esprit humain. Après avoir montré que la perfectibilité, les vertus sociales et les autres facultés que l’homme naturel avait reçues en puissance ne pouvaient jamais se développer d’elles-mêmes, qu’elles avaient besoin pour cela du concours fortuit de plusieurs causes étrangères qui pouvaient ne jamais naître, et sans lesquelles il fût demeuré éternellement dans sa condition primitive; il me reste à considérer et à rapprocher les différents hasards qui ont pu perfectionner la raison humaine, en détériorant l’espèce, rendre un être méchant en le rendant sociable, et d’un terme si éloigné amener enfin l’homme et le monde au point où nous les voyons.\n\nJ’avoue que les événements que j’ai à décrire ayant pu arriver de plusieurs manières, je ne puis me déterminer sur le choix que par des conjectures; mais outre que ces conjectures deviennent des raisons, quand elles sont les plus probables qu’on puisse tirer de la nature des choses et les seuls moyens qu’on puisse avoir de découvrir la vérité, les conséquences que je veux déduire des miennes ne seront point pour cela conjecturales, puisque, sur les principes que je viens d’établir, on ne saurait former aucun autre système qui ne me fournisse les mêmes résultats, et dont je ne puisse tirer les mêmes conclusions.\n\nCeci me dispensera d’étendre mes réflexions sur la la manière dont le laps de temps compense le peu de vraisemblance des événements; sur la puissance surprenante des causes très légères lorsqu’elles agissent sans relâche; sur l’impossibilité où l’on est d’un côté de détruire certaines hypothèses, si de l’autre on se trouve hors d’état de leur donner le degré de certitude des faits; sur ce que deux faits étant donnés comme réels à lier par une suite de faits intermédiaires, inconnus ou regardés comme tels, c’est à l’histoire, quand on l’a, de donner les faits qui les lient; c’est à la philosophie, à son défaut, de déterminer les faits semblables qui peuvent les lier; enfin sur ce qu’en matière d’événements, la similitude réduit les faits à un beaucoup plus petit nombre de classes différentes qu’on ne se l’imagine. Il me suffit d’offrir ces objets à la considération de mes juges; il me suffit d’avoir fait en sorte que les lecteurs vulgaires n’eussent pas besoin de les considérer.\n\n### Part Two, 1\n\nSECONDE PARTIE.\n\nLe premier qui, ayant enclos un terrain, s’avisa de dire: Ceci est à moi, et trouva des gens assez simples pour le croire, fut le vrai fondateur de la société civile. Que de crimes, de guerres, de meurtres, que de misères et d’horreurs n’eût point épargnés au genre humain celui qui, arrachant les pieux ou comblant le fossé, eût crié à ses  semblables: Gardez-vous d’écouter cet imposteur; vous êtes perdus, si vous oubliez que les fruits sont à tous, et que la terre n’est à personne! Mais il y a grande apparence qu’alors les choses en étaient déjà venues au point de ne pouvoir plus durer comme elles étaient: car cette idée de propriété, dépendant de beaucoup d’idées antérieures qui n’ont pu naître que successivement, ne se forma pas tout d’un coup dans l’esprit humain: il fallut faire bien des progrès, acquérir bien de l’industrie et des lumières, les transmettre et les augmenter d’âge en âge, avant que d’arriver à ce dernier terme de l’état de nature. Reprenons donc les choses de plus haut et tâchons de rassembler sous un seul point de vue cette lente succession d’événements et de connaissances dans leur ordre le plus naturel.\n\nLe premier sentiment de l’homme fut celui de son existence; son premier soin celui de sa conservation. Les productions de la terre lui fournissaient tous les secours nécessaires; l’instinct le porta à en faire usage. La faim, d’autres appétits, lui faisant éprouver tour à tour diverses manières d’exister, il y en eut une qui l’invita à perpétuer son espèce; et ce penchant aveugle, dépourvu de tout sentiment du cœur, ne produisait qu’un acte purement animal: le besoin satisfait, les deux sexes ne se reconnaissaient plus, et l’enfant même n’était plus rien à la mère sitôt qu’il pouvait se passer d’elle.\n\nTelle fut la condition de l’homme naissant; telle fut la vie d’un animal borné d’abord aux pures sensations, et profitant à peine des dons que lui offrait la nature, loin de songer à lui rien arracher; mais il se présenta bientôt des difficultés, il fallut apprendre à les vaincre: la hauteur des arbres qui l’empêchait d’atteindre à leurs fruits, la concurrence des animaux qui cherchaient à s’en nourrir, la férocité de ceux qui en voulaient à sa propre vie, tout l’obligea de s’appliquer aux exercices du corps; il fallut se rendre agile, vite à la course, vigoureux au combat. Les armes naturelles, qui sont les branches d’arbre et les pierres se trouvèrent bientôt sous sa main. Il apprit à surmonter les obstacles de la nature, à combattre au besoin les autres animaux, à disputer sa subsistance aux hommes mêmes, ou à se dédommager de ce qu’il fallait céder au plus fort. À mesure que le genre humain s’étendit, les peines se multiplièrent avec les hommes. La différence des terrains, des climats, des saisons, put les forcer à en mettre dans leurs manières de vivre. Des années stériles, des hivers longs et rudes, des étés brûlants qui consument tout, exigèrent d’eux une nouvelle industrie. Le long de la mer, et des rivières, ils inventèrent la ligne et l’hameçon, et devinrent pêcheurs et ichtyophages. Dans les forêts ils se firent des arcs et des flèches, et devinrent chasseurs et guerriers. Dans les pays froids ils se couvrirent des peaux des bêtes qu’ils avaient tuées. Le tonnerre, un volcan, ou quelque heureux hasard, leur fit connaître le feu, nouvelle ressource contre la rigueur de l’hiver: ils apprirent à conserver cet élément, puis à le reproduire, et enfin à en préparer les viandes qu’auparavant ils dévoraient crues. Cette application réitérée des êtres divers à lui-même, et les uns aux autres, dut naturellement engendrer dans l’esprit de l’homme les perceptions de certains rapports. Ces relations que nous exprimons par les mots de grand, de petit, de fort, de faible, de vite, de lent, de peureux, de hardi, et d’autres idées pareilles, comparées au besoin, et presque sans y songer, produisirent enfin chez lui quelque sorte de réflexion, ou plutôt une prudence machinale qui lui indiquait les précautions les plus nécessaires à sa sûreté.\n\nLes nouvelles lumières qui résultèrent de ce développement augmentèrent sa supériorité sur les autres animaux, en la lui faisant connaître. Il s’exerça à leur dresser des pièges, il leur donna le change en mille manières, et quoique plusieurs le surpassassent en force au combat, ou en vitesse à la course, de ceux qui pouvaient lui servir ou lui nuire, il devint avec le temps le maître des uns, et le fléau des autres. C’est ainsi que le premier regard qu’il porta sur lui-même y produisit le premier mouvement d’orgueil; c’est ainsi que sachant encore à peine distinguer les rangs, et se contemplant au premier par son espèce, il se préparait de loin à y prétendre par son individu. Quoique ses semblables ne fussent pas pour lui ce qu’ils sont pour nous, et qu’il n’eût guère plus de commerce avec eux qu’avec les autres animaux, ils ne furent pas oubliés dans ses observations. Les conformités que le temps put lui faire apercevoir entre eux, sa femelle et lui-même, le firent juger de celles qu’il n’apercevait pas, et voyant qu’ils se conduisaient tous, comme il aurait fait en de pareilles circonstances, il conclut que leur manière de penser et de sentir était entièrement conforme à la sienne, et cette importante vérité, bien établie dans son esprit, lui fit suivre par un pressentiment aussi sûr et plus prompt que la dialectique les meilleures règles de conduite que pour son avantage et sa sûreté il lui convînt de garder avec eux.\n\nInstruit par l’expérience que l’amour du bien-être est le seul mobile des actions humaines, il se trouva en état de distinguer les occasions rares où l’intérêt commun devait le faire compter sur l’assistance de ses semblables, et celles plus rares encore où la concurrence devait le faire défier d’eux. Dans le premier cas il s’unissait avec eux en troupeau, ou tout au plus par quelque sorte d’association libre qui n’obligeait personne, et qui ne durait qu’autant que le besoin passager qui l’avait formée. Dans le second chacun cherchait à prendre ses avantages, soit à force ouverte s’il croyait le pouvoir, soit par adresse et subtilité s’il se sentait le plus faible.\n\nVoilà comment les hommes purent insensiblement acquérir quelque idée grossière des engagements mutuels, et de l’avantage de les remplir, mais seulement autant que pouvait l’exiger l’intérêt présent et sensible; car la prévoyance n’était rien pour eux, et loin de s’occuper d’un avenir éloigné, ils ne songeaient pas même au lendemain. S’agissait-il de prendre un cerf, chacun sentait bien qu’il devait pour cela garder fidèlement son poste; mais si un lièvre venait à passer à la portée de l’un d’eux, il ne faut pas douter qu’il ne le poursuivît sans scrupule, et qu’ayant atteint sa proie il ne se souciât fort peu de faire manquer la leur à ses compagnons. Il est aisé de comprendre qu’un pareil commerce n’exigeait pas un langage beaucoup plus raffiné que celui des corneilles ou des singes, qui s’attroupent à peu près de même. Des cris inarticulés, beaucoup de gestes et quelques bruits imitatifs durent composer pendant longtemps la langue universelle, à quoi joignant dans chaque contrée quelques sons articulés et conventionnels dont, comme je l’ai déjà dit, il n’est pas trop facile d’expliquer l’institution, on eut des langues particulières, mais grossières, imparfaites, et telles à peu près qu’en ont encore aujourd’hui diverses nations sauvages. Je parcours comme un trait des multitudes de siècles, forcé par le temps qui s’écoule, par l’abondance des choses que j’ai à dire, et par le progrès presque insensible des commencements; car plus les événements étaient lents à se succéder, plus ils sont prompts à décrire. Ces premiers progrès mirent enfin l’homme à portée d’en faire de plus rapides. Plus l’esprit s’éclairait, et plus l’industrie se perfectionna. Bientôt cessant de s’endormir sous le premier arbre, ou de se retirer dans des cavernes, on trouva quelques sortes de haches de pierres dures et tranchantes, qui servirent à couper du bois, creuser la terre et faire des huttes de branchages, qu’on s’avisa ensuite d’enduire d’argile et de boue. Ce fut là l’époque d’une première révolution qui forma l’établissement et la distinction des familles, et qui introduisit une sorte de propriété; d’où peut-être naquirent déjà bien des querelles et des combats. Cependant comme les plus forts furent vraisemblablement les premiers à se faire des logements qu’ils se sentaient capables de défendre, il est à croire que les faibles trouvèrent plus court et plus sûr de les imiter que de tenter de les déloger; et quant à ceux qui avaient déjà des cabanes, chacun dut peu chercher à s’approprier celle de son voisin, moins parce qu’elle ne lui appartenait pas que parce qu’elle lui était inutile et qu’il ne pouvait s’en emparer, sans s’exposer à un combat très vif avec la famille qui l’occupait.\n\nLes premiers développements du cœur furent l’effet d’une situation nouvelle qui réunissait dans une habitation commune les maris et les femmes, les pères et les enfants; l’habitude de vivre ensemble fit naître les plus doux sentiments qui soient connus des hommes, l’amour conjugal, et l’amour paternel. Chaque famille devint une petite société d’autant mieux unie que l’attachement réciproque et la liberté en étaient les seuls liens; et ce fut alors que s’établit la première différence dans la manière de vivre des deux sexes, qui jusqu’ici n’en avaient eu qu’une. Les femmes devinrent plus sédentaires et s’accoutumèrent à garder la cabane et les enfants, tandis que l’homme allait chercher la subsistance commune. Les deux sexes commencèrent aussi par une vie un peu plus molle à perdre quelque chose de leur férocité et de leur vigueur: mais si chacun séparément devint moins propre à combattre les bêtes sauvages, en revanche il fut plus aisé de s’assembler pour leur résister en commun.\n\nDans ce nouvel état, avec une vie simple et solitaire, des besoins très bornés, et les instruments qu’ils avaient inventés pour y pourvoir, les hommes jouissant d’un fort grand loisir l’employèrent à se procurer plusieurs sortes de commodités inconnues à leurs pères; et ce fut là le premier joug qu’ils s’imposèrent sans y songer, et la première source de maux qu’ils préparèrent à leurs descendants; car outre qu’ils continuèrent ainsi à s’amollir le corps et l’esprit, ces commodités ayant par l’habitude perdu presque tout leur agrément, et étant en même temps dégénérées en de vrais besoins, la privation en devint beaucoup plus cruelle que la possession n’en était douce, et l’on était malheureux de les perdre, sans être heureux de les posséder.\n\nOn entrevoit un peu mieux ici comment l’usage de la parole s’établit ou se perfectionne insensiblement dans le sein de chaque famille, et l’on peut conjecturer encore comment diverses causes particulières purent étendre le langage, et en accélérer le progrès en le rendant plus nécessaire. De grandes inondations ou des tremblements de terre environnèrent d’eaux ou de précipices des cantons habités; des révolutions du globe détachèrent et coupèrent en îles des portions du continent. On conçoit qu’entre des hommes ainsi rapprochés et forcés de vivre ensemble, il dut se former un idiome commun plutôt qu’entre ceux qui erraient librement dans les forêts de la terre ferme. Ainsi il est très possible qu’après leurs premiers essais de navigation, des insulaires aient porté parmi nous l’usage de la parole; et il est au moins très vraisemblable que la société et les langues ont pris naissance dans les îles et s’y sont perfectionnées avant que d’être connues dans le continent.\n\nTout commence à changer de face. Les hommes errant jusqu’ici dans les bois, ayant pris une assiette plus fixe, se rapprochent lentement, se réunissent en diverses troupes, et forment enfin dans chaque contrée une nation particulière, unie de mœurs et de caractères, non par des règlements et des lois, mais par le même genre de vie et d’aliments, et par l’influence commune du climat. Un voisinage permanent ne peut manquer d’engendrer enfin quelque liaison entre diverses familles. De jeunes gens de différents sexes habitent des cabanes voisines, le commerce passager que demande la nature en amène bientôt un autre non moins doux et plus permanent par la fréquentation mutuelle. On s’accoutume à considérer différents objets et à faire des comparaisons; on acquiert insensiblement des idées de mérite et de beauté qui produisent des sentiments de préférence. À force de se voir, on ne peut plus se passer de se voir encore. Un sentiment tendre et doux s’insinue dans l’âme, et par la moindre opposition devient une fureur impétueuse: la jalousie s’éveille avec l’amour; la discorde triomphe et la plus douce des passions reçoit des sacrifices de sang humain.\n\nÀ mesure que les idées et les sentiments se succèdent, que l’esprit et le cœur s’exercent, le genre humain continue à s’apprivoiser, les liaisons s’étendent et les liens se resserrent. On s’accoutuma à s’assembler devant les cabanes ou autour d’un grand arbre: le chant et la danse, vrais enfants de l’amour et du loisir, devinrent l’amusement ou plutôt l’occupation des hommes et des femmes oisifs et attroupés. Chacun commença à regarder les autres et à vouloir être regardé soi-même, et l’estime publique eut un prix. Celui qui chantait ou dansait le mieux; le plus beau, le plus fort, le plus adroit ou le plus éloquent devint le plus considéré, et ce fut là le premier pas vers l’inégalité, et vers le vice en même temps: de ces premières préférences naquirent d’un côté la vanité et le mépris, de l’autre la honte et l’envie; et la fermentation causée par ces nouveaux levains produisit enfin des composés funestes au bonheur et à l’innocence.\n\n### Part Two, 2\n\nSitôt que les hommes eurent commencé à s’apprécier mutuellement et que l’idée de la considération fut formée dans leur esprit, chacun prétendit y avoir droit, et il ne fut plus possible d’en manquer impunément pour personne. De là sortirent les premiers devoirs de la civilité, même parmi les sauvages, et de là tout tort volontaire devint un outrage, parce qu’avec le mal qui résultait de l’injure, l’offensé y voyait le mépris de sa personne souvent plus insupportable que le mal même. C’est ainsi que chacun punissant le mépris qu’on lui avait témoigné d’une manière proportionnée au cas qu’il faisait de lui-même, les vengeances devinrent terribles, et les hommes sanguinaires et cruels. Voilà précisément le degré où étaient parvenus la plupart des peuples sauvages qui nous sont connus; et c’est faute d’avoir suffisamment distingué les idées, et remarqué combien ces peuples étaient déjà loin du premier état de nature, que plusieurs se sont hâtés de conclure que l’homme est naturellement cruel et qu’il a besoin de police pour l’adoucir, tandis que rien n’est si doux que lui dans son état primitif, lorsque placé par la nature à des distances égales de la stupidité des brutes et des lumières funestes de l’homme civil, et borné également par l’instinct et par la raison à se garantir du mal qui le menace, il est retenu par la pitié naturelle de faire lui-même du mal à personne, sans y être porté par rien, même après en avoir reçu. Car, selon l’axiome du sage Locke, il ne saurait y avoir d’injure, où il n’y a point de propriété.\n\nMais il faut remarquer que la société commencée et les relations déjà établies entre les hommes exigeaient en eux des qualités différentes de celles qu’ils tenaient de leur constitution primitive; que la moralité commençant à s’introduire dans les actions humaines, et chacun avant les lois étant seul juge et vengeur des offenses qu’il avait reçues, la bonté convenable au pur état de nature n’était plus celle qui convenait à la société naissante; qu’il fallait que les punitions devinssent plus sévères à mesure que les occasions d’offenser devenaient plus fréquentes, et que c’était à la terreur des vengeances de tenir lieu du frein des lois. Ainsi quoique les hommes fussent devenus moins endurants, et que la pitié naturelle eût déjà souffert quelque altération, cette période du développement des facultés humaines, tenant un juste milieu entre l’indolence de l’état primitif et la pétulante activité de notre amour-propre, dut être l’époque la plus heureuse et la plus durable. Plus on y réfléchit, plus on trouve que cet état était le moins sujet aux révolutions, le meilleur à l’homme (Note 16), et qu’il n’en a dû sortir que par quelque funeste hasard qui pour l’utilité commune eût dû ne jamais arriver. L’exemple des sauvages qu’on a presque tous trouvés à ce point semble confirmer que le genre humain était fait pour y rester toujours, que cet état est la véritable jeunesse du monde, et que tous les progrès ultérieurs ont été en apparence autant de pas vers la perfection de l’individu, et en effet vers la décrépitude de l’espèce.\n\nTant que les hommes se contentèrent de leurs cabanes rustiques, tant qu’ils se bornèrent à coudre leurs habits de peaux avec des épines ou des arêtes, à se parer de plumes et de coquillages, à se peindre le corps de diverses couleurs, à perfectionner ou à embellir leurs arcs et leurs flèches, à tailler avec des pierres tranchantes quelques canots de pêcheurs ou quelques grossiers instruments de musique, en un mot tant qu’ils ne s’appliquèrent qu’à des ouvrages qu’un seul pouvait faire, et qu’à des arts qui n’avaient pas besoin du concours de plusieurs mains, ils vécurent libres, sains, bons et heureux autant qu’ils pouvaient l’être par leur nature, et continuèrent à jouir entre eux des douceurs d’un commerce indépendant: mais dès l’instant qu’un homme eut besoin du secours d’un autre; dès qu’on s’aperçut qu’il était utile à un seul d’avoir des provisions pour deux, l’égalité disparut, la propriété s’introduisit, le travail devint nécessaire et les vastes forêts se changèrent en des campagnes riantes qu’il fallut arroser de la sueur des hommes, et dans lesquelles on vit bientôt l’esclavage et la misère germer et croître avec les moissons.\n\nLa métallurgie et l’agriculture furent les deux arts dont l’invention produisit cette grande révolution. Pour le poète, c’est l’or et l’argent, mais pour le philosophe ce sont le fer et le blé qui ont civilisé les hommes et perdu le genre humain; aussi l’un et l’autre étaient-ils inconnus aux sauvages de l’Amérique qui pour cela sont toujours demeurés tels; les autres peuples semblent même être restés barbares tant qu’ils ont pratiqué l’un de ces arts sans l’autre; et l’une des meilleures raisons peut-être pourquoi l’Europe a été, sinon plus tôt, du moins plus constamment et mieux policée que les autres parties du monde, c’est qu’elle est à la fois la plus abondante en fer et la plus fertile en blé.\n\nIl est très difficile de conjecturer comment les hommes sont parvenus à connaître et employer le fer: car il n’est pas croyable qu’ils aient imaginé d’eux-mêmes de tirer la matière de la mine et de lui donner les préparations nécessaires pour la mettre en fusion avant que de savoir ce qui en résulterait. D’un autre côté on peut d’autant moins attribuer cette découverte à quelque incendie accidentel que les mines ne se forment que dans des lieux arides et dénués d’arbres et de plantes, de sorte qu’on dirait que la nature avait pris des précautions pour nous dérober ce fatal secret. Il ne reste donc que la circonstance extraordinaire de quelque volcan qui, vomissant des matières métalliques en fusion, aura donné aux observateurs l’idée d’imiter cette opération de la nature; encore faut-il leur supposer bien du courage et de la prévoyance pour entreprendre un travail aussi pénible et envisager d’aussi loin les avantages qu’ils en pouvaient retirer; ce qui ne convient guère à des esprits déjà plus exercés que ceux-ci ne le devaient être.\n\nQuant à l’agriculture, le principe en fut connu longtemps avant que la pratique en fût établie, et il n’est guère possible que les hommes sans cesse occupés à tirer leur subsistance des arbres et des plantes n’eussent assez promptement l’idée des voies que la nature emploie pour la génération des végétaux; mais leur industrie ne se tourna probablement que fort tard de ce côté-là, soit parce que les arbres, qui avec la chasse et la pêche fournissaient à leur nourriture, n’avaient pas besoin de leurs soins, soit faute de connaître l’usage du blé, soit faute d’instruments pour le cultiver, soit faute de prévoyance pour le besoin à venir, soit enfin faute de moyens pour empêcher les autres de s’approprier le fruit de leur travail. Devenus plus industrieux, on peut croire qu’avec des pierres aiguës et des bâtons pointus ils commencèrent par cultiver quelques légumes ou racines autour de leurs cabanes, longtemps avant de savoir préparer le blé, et d’avoir les instruments nécessaires pour la culture en grand, sans compter que, pour se livrer à cette occupation et ensemencer des terres, il faut se résoudre à perdre d’abord quelque chose pour gagner beaucoup dans la suite; précaution fort éloignée du tour d’esprit de l’homme sauvage qui, comme je l’ai dit, a bien de la peine à songer le matin à ses besoins du soir.\n\nL’invention des autres arts fut donc nécessaire pour forcer le genre humain de s’appliquer à celui de l’agriculture. Dès qu’il fallut des hommes pour fondre et forger le fer, il fallut d’autres hommes pour nourrir ceux-là. Plus le nombre des ouvriers vint à se multiplier, moins il y eut de mains employées à fournir à la subsistance commune, sans qu’il y eût moins de bouches pour la consommer; et comme il fallut aux uns des denrées en échange de leur fer, les autres trouvèrent enfin le secret d’employer le fer à la multiplication des denrées. De là naquirent d’un côté le labourage et l’agriculture, et de l’autre l’art de travailler les métaux et d’en multiplier les usages.\n\nDe la culture des terres s’ensuivit nécessairement leur partage, et de la propriété une fois reconnue les premières règles de justice: car pour rendre à chacun le sien, il faut que chacun puisse avoir quelque chose; de plus les hommes commençant à porter leurs vues dans l’avenir, et se voyant tous quelques biens à perdre, il n’y en avait aucun qui n’eût à craindre pour soi la représaille des torts qu’il pouvait faire à autrui. Cette origine est d’autant plus naturelle, qu’il est impossible de concevoir l’idée de la propriété naissante d’ailleurs que de la main-d’œuvre; car on ne voit pas ce que, pour s’approprier les choses qu’il n’a point faites, l’homme y peut mettre de plus que son travail. C’est le seul travail qui, donnant droit au cultivateur sur le produit de la terre qu’il a labourée, lui en donne par conséquent sur le fonds, au moins jusqu’à la récolte, et ainsi d’année en année, ce qui, faisant une possession continue, se transforme aisément en propriété. Lorsque les Anciens, dit Grotius, ont donné à Cérès l’épithète de législatrice, et à une fête célébrée en son honneur le nom de Thesmophories, ils ont fait entendre par là que le partage des terres a produit une nouvelle sorte de droit. C’est-à-dire le droit de propriété, différent de celui qui résulte de loi naturelle.\n\nLes choses en cet état eussent pu demeurer égales, si les talents eussent été égaux, et que, par exemple, l’emploi du fer et la consommation des denrées eussent toujours fait une balance exacte: mais la proportion que rien ne maintenait fut bientôt rompue; le plus fort faisait plus d’ouvrage; le plus adroit tirait meilleur parti du sien; le plus ingénieux trouvait des moyens d’abréger le travail; le laboureur avait plus besoin de fer, ou le forgeron plus besoin de blé, et en travaillant également, l’un gagnait beaucoup tandis que l’autre avait peine à vivre. C’est ainsi que l’inégalité naturelle se déploie insensiblement avec celle de combinaison et que les différences des hommes, développées par celles des circonstances, se rendent plus sensibles, plus permanentes dans leurs effets, et commencent à influer dans la même proportion sur le sort des particuliers.\n\nLes choses étant parvenues à ce point, il est facile d’imaginer le reste. Je ne m’arrêterai pas à décrire l’invention successive des autres arts, le progrès des langues, l’épreuve et l’emploi des talents, l’inégalité des fortunes, l’usage ou l’abus des richesses, ni tous les détails qui suivent ceux-ci, et que chacun peut aisément suppléer. Je me bornerai seulement à jeter un coup d’œil sur le genre humain placé dans ce nouvel ordre de choses.\n\nVoilà donc toutes nos facultés développées, la mémoire et l’imagination en jeu, l’amour-propre intéressé, la raison rendue active et l’esprit arrivé presque au terme de la perfection, dont il est susceptible. Voilà toutes les qualités naturelles mises en action, le rang et le sort de chaque homme établi, non seulement sur la quantité des biens et le pouvoir de servir ou de nuire, mais sur l’esprit, la beauté, la force ou l’adresse, sur le mérite ou les talents, et ces qualités étant les seules qui pouvaient attirer de la considération, il fallut bientôt les avoir ou les affecter, il fallut pour son avantage se montrer autre que ce qu’on était en effet. Être et paraître devinrent deux choses tout à fait différentes, et de cette distinction sortirent le faste imposant, la ruse trompeuse, et tous les vices qui en sont le cortège. D’un autre côté, de libre et indépendant qu’était auparavant l’homme, le voilà par une multitude de nouveaux besoins assujetti, pour ainsi dire, à toute la nature, et surtout à ses semblables dont il devient l’esclave en un sens, même en devenant leur maître; riche, il a besoin de leurs services; pauvre, il a besoin de leur secours, et la médiocrité ne le met point en état de se passer d’eux. Il faut donc qu’il cherche sans cesse à les intéresser à son sort, et à leur faire trouver en effet ou en apparence leur profit à travailler pour le sien: ce qui le rend fourbe et artificieux avec les uns, impérieux et dur avec les autres, et le met dans la nécessité d’abuser tous ceux dont il a besoin, quand il ne peut s’en faire craindre, et qu’il ne trouve pas son intérêt à les servir utilement. Enfin l’ambition dévorante, l’ardeur d’élever sa fortune relative, moins par un véritable besoin que pour se mettre au-dessus des autres, inspire à tous les hommes un noir penchant à se nuire mutuellement, une jalousie secrète d’autant plus dangereuse que, pour faire son coup plus en sûreté, elle prend souvent le masque de la bienveillance; en un mot, concurrence et rivalité d’une part, de l’autre opposition d’intérêt, et toujours le désir caché de faire son profit aux dépens d’autrui, tous ces maux sont le premier effet de la propriété et le cortège inséparable de l’inégalité naissante.\n\nAvant qu’on eût inventé les signes représentatifs des richesses, elles ne pouvaient guère consister qu’en terres et en bestiaux, les seuls biens réels que les hommes puissent posséder. Or quand les héritages se furent accrus en nombre et en étendue au point de couvrir le sol entier et de se toucher tous, les uns ne purent plus s’agrandir qu’aux dépens des autres, et les surnuméraires que la faiblesse ou l’indolence avaient empêchés d’en acquérir à leur tour, devenus pauvres sans avoir rien perdu, parce que, tout changeant autour d’eux, eux seuls n’avaient point changé, furent obligés de recevoir ou de ravir leur subsistance de la main des riches, et de là commencèrent à naître, selon les divers caractères des uns et des autres, la domination et la servitude, ou la violence et les rapines. Les riches de leur côté connurent à peine le plaisir de dominer, qu’ils dédaignèrent bientôt tous les autres, et se servant de leurs anciens esclaves pour en soumettre de nouveaux, ils ne songèrent qu’à subjuguer et asservir leurs voisins; semblables à ces loups affamés qui ayant une fois goûté de la chair humaine rebutent toute autre nourriture et ne veulent plus que dévorer des hommes.\n\n### Part Two, 3\n\nC’est ainsi que les plus puissants ou les plus misérables, se faisant de leur force ou de leurs besoins une sorte de droit au bien d’autrui, équivalent, selon eux, à celui de propriété, l’égalité rompue fut suivie du plus affreux désordre: c’est ainsi que les usurpations des riches, les brigandages des pauvres, les passions effrénées de tous étouffant la pitié naturelle, et la voix encore faible de la justice, rendirent les hommes avares, ambitieux et méchants. Il s’élevait entre le droit du plus fort et le droit du premier occupant un conflit perpétuel qui ne se terminait que par des combats et des meurtres (Note 17). La société naissante fit place au plus horrible état de guerre: le genre humain avili et désolé, ne pouvant plus retourner sur ses pas ni renoncer aux acquisitions malheureuses qu’il avait faites et ne travaillant qu’à sa honte, par l’abus des facultés qui l’honorent, se mit lui-même à la veille de sa ruine.\n\nAttonitus novitate mali, divesque miserque,\n\nEffugere optat opes, et quoe modò voverat, odit.\n\nIl n’est pas possible que les hommes n’aient fait enfin des réflexions sur une situation aussi misérable, et sur les calamités dont ils étaient accablés. Les riches surtout durent bientôt sentir combien leur était désavantageuse une guerre perpétuelle dont ils faisaient seuls tous les frais et dans laquelle le risque de la vie était commun et celui des biens, particulier. D’ailleurs, quelque couleur qu’ils pussent donner à leurs usurpations, ils sentaient assez qu’elles n’étaient établies que sur un droit précaire et abusif et que n’ayant été acquises que par la force, la force pouvait les leur ôter sans qu’ils eussent raison de s’en plaindre. Ceux mêmes que la seule industrie avait enrichis ne pouvaient guère fonder leur propriété sur de meilleurs titres. Ils avaient beau dire: C’est moi qui ai bâti ce mur; j’ai gagné ce terrain par mon travail. Qui vous a donné les alignements, leur pouvait-on répondre, et en vertu de quoi prétendez-vous être payé à nos dépens d’un travail que nous ne vous avons point imposé? Ignorez-vous qu’une multitude de vos frères périt, ou souffre du besoin de ce que vous avez de trop, et qu’il vous fallait un consentement exprès et unanime du genre humain pour vous approprier sur la subsistance commune tout ce qui allait au-delà de la vôtre? Destitué de raisons valables pour se justifier, et de forces suffisantes pour se défendre; écrasant facilement un particulier, mais écrasé lui-même par des troupes de bandits, seul contre tous, et ne pouvant à cause des jalousies mutuelles s’unir avec ses égaux contre des ennemis unis par l’espoir commun du pillage, le riche, pressé par la nécessité, conçut enfin le projet le plus réfléchi qui soit jamais entré dans l’esprit humain; ce fut d’employer en sa faveur les forces mêmes de ceux qui l’attaquaient, de faire ses défenseurs de ses adversaires, de leur inspirer d’autres maximes, et de leur donner d’autres institutions qui lui fussent aussi favorables que le droit naturel lui était contraire.\n\nDans cette vue, après avoir exposé à ses voisins l’horreur d’une situation qui les armait tous les uns contre les autres, qui leur rendait leurs possessions aussi onéreuses que leurs besoins, et où nul ne trouvait sa sûreté ni dans la pauvreté ni dans la richesse, il inventa aisément des raisons spécieuses pour les amener à son but. « Unissons-nous, leur dit-il, pour garantir de l’oppression les faibles, contenir les ambitieux, et assurer à chacun la possession de ce qui lui appartient. Instituons des règlements de justice et de paix auxquels tous soient obligés de se conformer, qui ne fassent acception de personne, et qui réparent en quelque sorte les caprices de la fortune en soumettant également le puissant et le faible à des devoirs mutuels. En un mot, au lieu de tourner nos forces contre nous-mêmes, rassemblons-les en un pouvoir suprême qui nous gouverne selon de sages lois, qui protège et défende tous les membres de l’association, repousse les ennemis communs et nous maintienne dans une concorde éternelle. »\n\nIl en fallut beaucoup moins que l’équivalent de ce discours pour entraîner des hommes grossiers, faciles à séduire, qui d’ailleurs avaient trop d’affaires à démêler entre eux pour pouvoir se passer d’arbitres, et trop d’avarice et d’ambition, pour pouvoir longtemps se passer de maîtres. Tous coururent au-devant de leurs fers croyant assurer leur liberté; car avec assez de raison pour sentir les avantages d’un établissement politique, ils n’avaient pas assez d’expérience pour en prévoir les dangers; les plus capables de pressentir les abus étaient précisément ceux qui comptaient d’en profiter, et les sages mêmes virent qu’il fallait se résoudre à sacrifier une partie de leur liberté à la conservation de l’autre, comme un blessé se fait couper le bras pour sauver le reste du corps. Telle fut, ou dut être, l’origine de la société et des lois, qui donnèrent de nouvelles entraves au faible et de nouvelles forces au riche (Note 18), détruisirent sans retour la liberté naturelle, fixèrent pour jamais la loi de la propriété et de l’inégalité, d’une adroite usurpation firent un droit irrévocable, et pour le profit de quelques ambitieux assujettirent désormais tout le genre humain au travail, à la servitude et à la misère. On voit aisément comment l’établissement d’une seule société rendit indispensable celui de toutes les autres, et comment, pour faire tête à des forces unies, il fallut s’unir à son tour. Les sociétés se multipliant ou s’étendant rapidement couvrirent bientôt toute la surface de la terre, et il ne fut plus possible de trouver un seul coin dans l’univers où l’on pût s’affranchir du joug et soustraire sa tête au glaive souvent mal conduit que chaque homme vit perpétuellement suspendu sur la sienne. Le droit civil étant ainsi devenu la règle commune des citoyens, la loi de nature n’eut plus lieu qu’entre les diverses sociétés, où, sous le nom de droit des gens, elle fut tempérée par quelques conventions tacites pour rendre le commerce possible et suppléer à la commisération naturelle, qui, perdant de société à société presque toute la force qu’elle avait d’homme à homme, ne réside plus que dans quelques grandes âmes cosmopolites, qui franchissent les barrières imaginaires qui séparent les peuples, et qui, à l’exemple de l’être souverain qui les a créés, embrassent tout le genre humain dans leur bienveillance.\n\nLes corps politiques restant ainsi entre eux dans l’état de nature se ressentirent bientôt des inconvénients qui avaient forcé les particuliers d’en sortir, et cet état devint encore plus funeste entre ces grands corps qu’il ne l’avait été auparavant entre les individus dont ils étaient composés. De là sortirent les guerres nationales, les batailles, les meurtres, les représailles qui font frémir la nature et choquent la raison, et tous ces préjugés horribles qui placent au rang des vertus l’honneur de répandre le sang humain. Les plus honnêtes gens apprirent à compter parmi leurs devoirs celui d’égorger leurs semblables; on vit enfin les hommes se massacrer par milliers sans savoir pourquoi; et il se commettait plus de meurtres en un seul jour de combat et plus d’horreurs à la prise d’une seule ville qu’il ne s’en était commis dans l’état de nature durant des siècles entiers sur toute la face de la terre. Tels sont les premiers effets qu’on entrevoit de la division du genre humain en différentes sociétés. Revenons à leur institution.\n\nJe sais que plusieurs ont donné d’autres origines aux sociétés politiques, comme les conquêtes du plus puissant ou l’union des faibles, et le choix entre ces causes est indifférent à ce que je veux établir: cependant celle que je viens d’exposer me paraît la plus naturelle par les raisons suivantes: 1. Que dans le premier cas, le droit de conquête n’étant point un droit n’en a pu fonder aucun autre, le conquérant et les peuples conquis restant toujours entre eux dans l’état de guerre, à moins que la nation remise en pleine liberté ne choisisse volontairement son vainqueur pour son chef. Jusque-là, quelques capitulations qu’on ait faites, comme elles n’ont été fondées que sur la violence, et que par conséquent elles sont nulles par le fait même, il ne peut y avoir dans cette hypothèse ni véritable société, ni corps politique, ni d’autre loi que celle du plus fort. 2. Que ces mots de fort et de faible sont équivoques dans le second cas; que dans l’intervalle qui se trouve entre l’établissement du droit de propriété ou de premier occupant, et celui des gouvernements politiques, le sens de ces termes est mieux rendu par ceux de pauvre et de riche, parce qu’en effet un homme n’avait point avant les lois d’autre moyen d’assujettir ses égaux qu’en attaquant leur bien, ou leur faisant quelque part du sien. 3. Que les pauvres n’ayant rien à perdre que leur liberté, c’eût été une grande folie à eux de s’ôter volontairement le seul bien qui leur restait pour ne rien gagner en échange; qu’au contraire les riches étant, pour ainsi dire, sensibles dans toutes les parties de leurs biens, il était beaucoup plus aisé de leur faire du mal, qu’ils avaient par conséquent plus de précautions à prendre pour s’en garantir et qu’enfin il est raisonnable de croire qu’une chose a été inventée par ceux à qui elle est utile plutôt que par ceux à qui elle fait du tort.\n\nLe gouvernement naissant n’eut point une forme constante et régulière. Le défaut de philosophie et d’expérience ne laissait apercevoir que les inconvénients présents, et l’on ne songeait à remédier aux autres qu’à mesure qu’ils se présentaient. Malgré tous les travaux des plus sages législateurs, l’état politique demeura toujours imparfait, parce qu’il était presque l’ouvrage du hasard, et que, mal commencé, le temps en découvrant les défauts et suggérant des remèdes, ne put jamais réparer les vices de la constitution. On raccommodait sans cesse, au lieu qu’il eût fallu commencer par nettoyer l’aire et écarter tous les vieux matériaux, comme fit Lycurgue à Sparte, pour élever ensuite un bon édifice. La société ne consista d’abord qu’en quelques conventions générales que tous les particuliers s’engageaient à observer et dont la communauté se rendait garante envers chacun d’eux. Il fallut que l’expérience montrât combien une pareille constitution était faible, et combien il était facile aux infracteurs d’éviter la conviction ou le châtiment des fautes dont le public seul devait être le témoin et le juge; il fallut que la loi fût éludée de mille manières; il fallut que les inconvénients et les désordres se multipliassent continuellement, pour qu’on songeât enfin à confier à des particuliers le dangereux dépôt de l’autorité publique et qu’on commît à des magistrats le soin de faire observer les délibérations du peuple: car de dire que les chefs furent choisis avant que la confédération fût faite et que les ministres des lois existèrent avant les lois mêmes, c’est une supposition qu’il n’est pas permis de combattre sérieusement.\n\nIl ne serait pas plus raisonnable de croire que les peuples se sont d’abord jetés entre les bras d’un maître absolu, sans conditions et sans retour, et que le premier moyen de pourvoir à la sûreté commune qu’aient imaginé des hommes fiers et indomptés a été de se précipiter dans l’esclavage. En effet, pourquoi se sont-ils donné des supérieurs, si ce n’est pour les défendre contre l’oppression, et protéger leurs biens, leurs libertés, et leurs vies, qui sont, pour ainsi dire, les éléments constitutifs de leur être? Or, dans les relations d’homme à homme, le pis qui puisse arriver à l’un étant de se voir à la discrétion de l’autre, n’eût-il pas été contre le bon sens de commencer par se dépouiller entre les mains d’un chef des seules choses pour la conservation desquelles ils avaient besoin de son secours? Quel équivalent eût-il pu leur offrir pour la concession d’un si beau droit; et, s’il eût osé l’exiger sous le prétexte de les défendre, n’eût-il pas aussitôt reçu la réponse de l’apologue: Que nous fera de plus l’ennemi? Il est donc incontestable, et c’est la maxime fondamentale de tout le droit politique, que les peuples se sont donné des chefs pour défendre leur liberté et non pour les asservir. Si nous avons un prince, disait Pline à Trajan, c’est afin qu’il nous préserve d’avoir un maître.\n\nLes politiques font sur l’amour de la liberté les mêmes sophismes que les philosophes ont faits sur l’état de nature; par les choses qu’ils voient ils jugent des choses très différentes qu’ils n’ont pas vues et ils attribuent aux hommes un penchant naturel à la servitude par la patience avec laquelle ceux qu’ils ont sous les yeux supportent la leur, sans songer qu’il en est de la liberté comme de l’innocence et de la vertu, dont on ne sent le prix qu’autant qu’on en jouit soi-même et dont le goût se perd sitôt qu’on les a perdues. Je connais les délices de ton pays, disait Brasidas à un satrape qui comparait la vie de Sparte à celle de Persépolis, mais tu ne peux connaître les plaisirs du mien.\n\nComme un coursier indompté hérisse ses crins, frappe la terre du pied et se débat impétueusement à la seule approche du mors, tandis qu’un cheval dressé souffre patiemment la verge et l’éperon, l’homme barbare ne plie point sa tête au joug que l’homme civilisé porte sans murmure, et il préfère la plus orageuse liberté à un assujettissement tranquille. Ce n’est donc pas par l’avilissement des peuples asservis qu’il faut juger des dispositions naturelles de l’homme pour ou contre la servitude, mais par les prodiges qu’ont faits tous les peuples libres pour se garantir de l’oppression. Je sais que les premiers ne font que vanter sans cesse la paix et le repos dont ils jouissent dans leurs fers, et que miserrimam servitutem pacem appellant; mais quand je vois les autres sacrifier les plaisirs, le repos, la richesse, la puissance et la vie même à la conservation de ce seul bien si dédaigné de ceux qui l’ont perdu; quand je vois des animaux nés libres et abhorrant la captivité se briser la tête contre les barreaux de leur prison, quand je vois des multitudes de sauvages tout nus mépriser les voluptés européennes et braver la faim, le feu, le fer et la mort pour ne conserver que leur indépendance, je sens que ce n’est pas à des esclaves qu’il appartient de raisonner de liberté.\n\n### Part Two, 4\n\nQuant à l’autorité paternelle dont plusieurs on fait dériver le gouvernement absolu et toute la société, sans recourir aux preuves contraires de Locke et de Sidney, il suffit de remarquer que rien au monde n’est plus éloigné de l’esprit féroce du despotisme que la douceur de cette autorité qui regarde plus à l’avantage de celui qui obéit qu’à l’utilité de celui qui commande; que par la loi de nature le père n’est le maître de l’enfant qu’aussi longtemps que son secours lui est nécessaire, qu’au-delà de ce terme ils deviennent égaux et qu’alors le fils, parfaitement indépendant du père, ne lui doit que du respect, et non de l’obéissance; car la reconnaissance est bien un devoir qu’il faut rendre, mais non pas un droit qu’on puisse exiger. Au lieu de dire que la société civile dérive du pouvoir paternel, il fallait dire au contraire que c’est d’elle que ce pouvoir tire sa principale force: un individu ne fut reconnu pour le père de plusieurs que quand ils restèrent assemblés autour de lui. Les biens du père, dont il est véritablement le maître, sont les liens qui retiennent ses enfants dans sa dépendance, et il peut ne leur donner part à sa succession qu’à proportion qu’ils auront bien mérité de lui par une continuelle déférence à ses volontés. Or, loin que les sujets aient quelque faveur semblable à attendre de leur despote, comme ils lui appartiennent en propre, eux et tout ce qu’ils possèdent, ou du moins qu’il le prétend ainsi, ils sont réduits à recevoir comme une faveur ce qu’il leur laisse de leur propre bien; il fait justice quand il les dépouille; il fait grâce quand il les laisse vivre.\n\nEn continuant d’examiner ainsi les faits par le droit, on ne trouverait pas plus de solidité que de vérité dans l’établissement volontaire de la tyrannie, et il serait difficile de montrer la validité d’un contrat qui n’obligerait qu’une des parties, où l’on mettrait tout d’un côté et rien de l’autre et qui ne tournerait qu’au préjudice de celui qui s’engage. Ce système odieux est bien éloigné d’être même aujourd’hui celui des sages et bons monarques, et surtout des rois de France, comme on peut le voir en divers endroits de leurs édits et en particulier dans le passage suivant d’un écrit célèbre, publié en 1667, au nom et par les ordres de Louis XIV: Qu’on ne dise donc point que le souverain ne soit pas sujet aux lois de son État, puisque la proposition contraire est une vérité du droit des gens que la flatterie a quelquefois attaquée, mais que les bons princes ont toujours défendue comme une divinité tutélaire de leurs États. Combien est-il plus légitime de dire avec le sage Platon que la parfaite félicité d’un royaume est qu’un prince soit obéi de ses sujets, que le prince obéisse à la loi, et que la loi soit droite et toujours dirigée au bien public. Je ne m’arrêterai point à rechercher si, la liberté étant la plus noble des facultés de l’homme, ce n’est pas dégrader sa nature, se mettre au niveau des bêtes esclaves de l’instinct, offenser même l’auteur de son être, que de renoncer sans réserve au plus précieux de tous ses dons, que de se soumettre à commettre tous les crimes qu’il nous défend, pour complaire à un maître féroce ou insensé, et si cet ouvrier sublime doit être plus irrité de voir détruire que déshonorer son plus bel ouvrage. Je demanderai seulement de quel droit ceux qui n’ont pas craint de s’avilir eux-mêmes jusqu’à ce point ont pu soumettre leur postérité à la même ignominie, et renoncer pour elle à des biens qu’elle ne tient point de leur libéralité, et sans lesquels la vie même est onéreuse à tous ceux qui en sont dignes?\n\nPufendorf dit que, tout de même qu’on transfère son bien à autrui par des conventions et des contrats, on peut aussi se dépouiller de sa liberté en faveur de quelqu’un. C’est là, ce me semble, un fort mauvais raisonnement; car premièrement le bien que j’aliène me devient une chose tout à fait étrangère, et dont l’abus m’est indifférent, mais il m’importe qu’on n’abuse point de ma liberté, et je ne puis sans me rendre coupable du mal qu’on me forcera de faire, m’exposer à devenir l’instrument du crime. De plus, le droit de propriété n’étant que de convention et d’institution humaine, tout homme peut à son gré disposer de ce qu’il possède: mais il n’en est pas de même des dons essentiels de la nature, tels que la vie et la liberté, dont il est permis à chacun de jouir et dont il est moins douteux qu’on ait droit de se dépouiller. En s’ôtant l’une on dégrade son être; en s’ôtant l’autre on l’anéantit autant qu’il est en soi; et comme nul bien temporel ne peut dédommager de l’une et de l’autre, ce serait offenser à la fois la nature et la raison que d’y renoncer à quelque prix que ce fût. Mais quand on pourrait aliéner sa liberté comme ses biens, la différence serait très grande pour les enfants qui ne jouissent des biens du père que par transmission de son droit, au lieu que, la liberté étant un don qu’ils tiennent de la nature en qualité d’hommes, leurs parents n’ont eu aucun droit de les en dépouiller; de sorte que comme pour établir l’esclavage, il a fallu faire violence à la nature, il a fallu la changer pour perpétuer ce droit, et les jurisconsultes qui ont gravement prononcé que l’enfant d’une esclave naîtrait esclave ont décidé en d’autres termes qu’un homme ne naîtrait pas homme.\n\nIl me paraît donc certain que non seulement les gouvernements n’ont point commencé par le pouvoir arbitraire, qui n’en est que la corruption, le terme extrême, et qui les ramène enfin à la seule loi du plus fort dont ils furent d’abord le remède, mais encore que, quand même ils auraient ainsi commencé, ce pouvoir, étant par sa nature illégitime, n’a pu servir de fondement aux droits de la société, ni par conséquent à l’inégalité d’institution.\n\nSans entrer aujourd’hui dans les recherches qui sont encore à faire sur la nature du pacte fondamental de tout gouvernement, je me borne en suivant l’opinion commune à considérer ici l’établissement du corps politique comme un vrai contrat entre le peuple et les chefs qu’il se choisit, contrat par lequel les deux parties s’obligent à l’observation des lois qui y sont stipulées et qui forment les liens de leur union. Le peuple ayant, au sujet des relations sociales, réuni toutes ses volontés en une seule, tous les articles sur lesquels cette volonté s’explique deviennent autant de lois fondamentales qui obligent tous les membres de l’État sans exception, et l’une desquelles règle le choix et le pouvoir des magistrats chargés de veiller à l’exécution des autres. Ce pouvoir s’étend à tout ce qui peut maintenir la constitution, sans aller jusqu’à la changer. On y joint des honneurs qui rendent respectables les lois et leurs ministres, et pour ceux-ci personnellement des prérogatives qui les dédommagent des pénibles travaux que coûte une bonne administration. Le magistrat, de son côté, s’oblige à n’user du pouvoir qui lui est confié que selon l’intention des commettants, à maintenir chacun dans la paisible jouissance de ce qui lui appartient et à préférer en toute occasion l’utilité publique à son propre intérêt. Avant que l’expérience eût montré, ou que la connaissance du cœur humain eût fait prévoir les abus inévitables d’une telle constitution, elle dut paraître d’autant meilleure que ceux qui étaient chargés de veiller à sa conservation y étaient eux-mêmes le plus intéressés; car la magistrature et ses droits n’étant établis que sur les lois fondamentales, aussitôt qu’elles seraient détruites, les magistrats cesseraient d’être légitimes, le peuple ne serait plus tenu de leur obéir, et comme ce n’aurait pas été le magistrat, mais la loi qui aurait constitué l’essence de l’État, chacun rentrerait de droit dans sa liberté naturelle.\n\nPour peu qu’on y réfléchît attentivement, ceci se confirmerait par de nouvelles raisons et par la nature du contrat on verrait qu’il ne saurait être irrévocable: car s’il n’y avait point de pouvoir supérieur qui pût être garant de la fidélité des contractants, ni les forcer à remplir leurs engagements réciproques, les parties demeureraient seules juges dans leur propre cause et chacune d’elles aurait toujours le droit de renoncer au contrat, sitôt qu’elle trouverait que l’autre en enfreint les conditions ou qu’elles cesseraient de lui convenir. C’est sur ce principe qu’il semble que le droit d’abdiquer peut être fondé. Or, à ne considérer, comme nous faisons, que l’institution humaine, si le magistrat qui a tout le pouvoir en main et qui s’approprie tous les avantages du contrat, avait pourtant le droit de renoncer à l’autorité; à plus forte raison le peuple, qui paye toutes les fautes des chefs, devrait avoir le droit de renoncer à la dépendance. Mais les dissensions affreuses, les désordres infinis qu’entraînerait nécessairement ce dangereux pouvoir, montrent plus que toute autre chose combien les gouvernements humains avaient besoin d’une base plus solide que la seule raison et combien il était nécessaire au repos public que la volonté divine intervînt pour donner à l’autorité souveraine un caractère sacré et inviolable qui ôtât aux sujets le funeste droit d’en disposer. Quand la religion n’aurait fait que ce bien aux hommes, c’en serait assez pour qu’ils dussent tous la chérir et l’adopter, même avec ses abus, puisqu’elle épargne encore plus de sang que le fanatisme n’en fait couler: mais suivons le fil de notre hypothèse. Les diverses formes des gouvernements tirent leur origine des différences plus ou moins grandes qui se trouvèrent entre les particuliers au moment de l’institution. Un homme était-il éminent en pouvoir, en vertu, en richesses ou en crédit? il fut seul élu magistrat, et l’État devint monarchique; si plusieurs à peu près égaux entre eux l’emportaient sur tous les autres, ils furent élus conjointement, et l’on eut une aristocratie. Ceux dont la fortune ou les talents étaient moins disproportionnés et qui s’étaient le moins éloignés de l’état de nature gardèrent en commun l’administration suprême et formèrent une démocratie. Le temps vérifia laquelle de ces formes était la plus avantageuse aux hommes. Les uns restèrent uniquement soumis aux lois, les autres obéirent bientôt à des maîtres. Les citoyens voulurent garder leur liberté, les sujets ne songèrent qu’à l’ôter à leurs voisins, ne pouvant souffrir que d’autres jouissent d’un bien dont ils ne jouissaient plus eux-mêmes. En un mot, d’un côté furent les richesses et les conquêtes, et de l’autre le bonheur et la vertu.\n\nDans ces divers gouvernements, toutes les magistratures furent d’abord électives, et quand la richesse ne l’emportait pas, la préférence était accordée au mérite qui donne un ascendant naturel et à l’âge qui donne l’expérience dans les affaires et le sang-froid dans les délibérations. Les anciens des Hébreux, les Gérontes de Sparte, le Sénat de Rome, et l’étymologie même de notre mot Seigneur montrent combien autrefois la vieillesse était respectée. Plus les élections tombaient sur des hommes avancés en âge, plus elles devenaient fréquentes, et plus leurs embarras se faisaient sentir; les brigues s’introduisirent, les factions se formèrent, les partis s’aigrirent, les guerres civiles s’allumèrent, enfin le sang des citoyens fut sacrifié au prétendu bonheur de l’État, et l’on fut à la veille de retomber dans l’anarchie des temps antérieurs. L’ambition des principaux profita de ces circonstances pour perpétuer leurs charges dans leurs familles: le peuple déjà accoutumé à la dépendance, au repos et aux commodités de la vie, et déjà hors d’état de briser ses fers, consentit à laisser augmenter sa servitude pour affermir sa tranquillité et c’est ainsi que les chefs devenus héréditaires s’accoutumèrent à regarder leur magistrature comme un bien de famille, à se regarder eux-mêmes comme les propriétaires de l’État dont ils n’étaient d’abord que les officiers, à appeler leurs concitoyens leurs esclaves, à les compter comme du bétail au nombre des choses qui leur appartenaient et à s’appeler eux-mêmes égaux aux dieux et rois des rois.\n\nSi nous suivons le progrès de l’inégalité dans ces différentes révolutions, nous trouverons que l’établissement de la loi et du droit de propriété fut son premier terme; l’institution de la magistrature le second, que le troisième et dernier fut le changement du pouvoir légitime en pouvoir arbitraire; en sorte que l’état de riche et de pauvre fut autorisé par la première époque, celui de puissant et de faible par la seconde, et par la troisième celui de maître et d’esclave, qui est le dernier degré de l’inégalité, et le terme auquel aboutissent enfin tous les autres, jusqu’à ce que de nouvelles révolutions dissolvent tout à fait le gouvernement, ou le rapprochent de l’institution légitime.\n\nPour comprendre la nécessité de ce progrès il faut moins considérer les motifs de l’établissement du corps politique que la forme qu’il prend dans son exécution et les inconvénients qu’il entraîne après lui: car les vices qui rendent nécessaires les institutions sociales sont les mêmes qui en rendent l’abus inévitable; et comme, excepté la seule Sparte, où la loi veillait principalement à l’éducation des enfants et où Lycurgue établit des mœurs qui le dispensaient presque d’y ajouter des lois, les lois en général moins fortes que les passions contiennent les hommes sans les changer; il serait aisé de prouver que tout gouvernement qui, sans se corrompre ni s’altérer, marcherait toujours exactement selon la fin de son institution, aurait été institué sans nécessité, et qu’un pays où personne n’éluderait les lois et n’abuserait de la magistrature, n’aurait besoin ni de magistrats ni de lois.\n\n### Part Two, 5\n\nLes distinctions politiques amènent nécessairement les distinctions civiles. L’inégalité, croissant entre le peuple et ses chefs, se fait bientôt sentir parmi les particuliers et s’y modifie en mille manières selon les passions, les talents et les occurrences. Le magistrat ne saurait usurper un pouvoir illégitime sans se faire des créatures auxquelles il est forcé d’en céder quelque partie. D’ailleurs, les citoyens ne se laissent opprimer qu’autant qu’entraînés par une aveugle ambition et regardant plus au-dessous qu’au-dessus d’eux, la domination leur devient plus chère que l’indépendance, et qu’ils consentent à porter des fers pour en pouvoir donner à leur tour. Il est très difficile de réduire à l’obéissance celui qui ne cherche point à commander et le politique le plus adroit ne viendrait pas à bout d’assujettir des hommes qui ne voudraient qu’être libres; mais l’inégalité s’étend sans peine parmi des âmes ambitieuses et lâches, toujours prêtes à courir les risques de la fortune et à dominer ou servir presque indifféremment selon qu’elle leur devient favorable ou contraire. C’est ainsi qu’il dut venir un temps où les yeux du peuple furent fascinés à tel point que ses conducteurs n’avaient qu’à dire au plus petit des hommes: Sois grand, toi et toute ta race, aussitôt il paraissait grand à tout le monde ainsi qu’à ses propres yeux, et ses descendants s’élevaient encore à mesure qu’ils s’éloignaient de lui; plus la cause était reculée et incertaine, plus l’effet augmentait; plus on pouvait compter de fainéants dans une famille, et plus elle devenait illustre.\n\nSi c’était ici le lieu d’entrer en des détails, j’expliquerais facilement comment l’inégalité de crédit et d’autorité devient inévitable entre les particuliers (Note 19) sitôt que réunis en une même société ils sont forcés de se comparer entre eux et de tenir compte des différences qu’ils trouvent dans l’usage continuel qu’ils ont à faire les uns des autres. Ces différences sont de plusieurs espèces, mais en général la richesse, la noblesse ou le rang, la puissance et le mérite personnel, étant les distinctions principales par lesquelles on se mesure dans la société, je prouverais que l’accord ou le conflit de ces forces diverses est l’indication la plus sûre d’un État bien ou mal constitué. Je ferais voir qu’entre ces quatre sortes d’inégalité, les qualités personnelles étant l’origine de toutes les autres, la richesse est la dernière à laquelle elles se réduisent à la fin, parce qu’étant la plus immédiatement utile au bien-être et la plus facile à communiquer, on s’en sert aisément pour acheter tout le reste. Observation qui peut faire juger assez exactement de la mesure dont chaque peuple s’est éloigné de son institution primitive, et du chemin qu’il a fait vers le terme extrême de la corruption. Je remarquerais combien ce désir universel de réputation, d’honneurs et de préférences, qui nous dévore tous, exerce et compare les talents et les forces, combien il excite et multiplie les passions, et combien, rendant tous les hommes concurrents, rivaux ou plutôt ennemis, il cause tous les jours de revers, de succès et de catastrophes de toute espèce en faisant courir la même lice à tant de prétendants. Je montrerais que c’est à cette ardeur de faire parler de soi, à cette fureur de se distinguer qui nous tient presque toujours hors de nous-mêmes, que nous devons ce qu’il y a de meilleur et de pire parmi les hommes, nos vertus et nos vices, nos sciences et nos erreurs, nos conquérants et nos philosophes, c’est-à-dire une multitude de mauvaises choses sur un petit nombre de bonnes. Je prouverais enfin que si l’on voit une poignée de puissants et de riches au faîte des grandeurs et de la fortune, tandis que la foule rampe dans l’obscurité et dans la misère, c’est que les premiers n’estiment les choses dont ils jouissent qu’autant que les autres en sont privés, et que, sans changer d’état, ils cesseraient d’être heureux, si le peuple cessait d’être misérable.\n\nMais ces détails seraient seuls la matière d’un ouvrage considérable dans lequel on pèserait les avantages et les inconvénients de tout gouvernement, relativement aux droits de l’état de nature, et où l’on dévoilerait toutes les faces différentes sous lesquelles l’inégalité s’est montrée jusqu’à ce jour et pourra se montrer dans les siècles selon la nature de ces gouvernements et les révolutions que le temps y amènera nécessairement. On verrait la multitude opprimée au-dedans par une suite des précautions mêmes qu’elle avait prises contre ce qui la menaçait au-dehors. On verrait l’oppression s’accroître continuellement sans que les opprimés pussent jamais savoir quel terme elle aurait, ni quels moyens légitimes il leur resterait pour l’arrêter. On verrait les droits des citoyens et les libertés nationales s’éteindre peu à peu, et les réclamations des faibles traitées de murmures séditieux. On verrait la politique restreindre à une portion mercenaire du peuple l’honneur de défendre la cause commune: on verrait de là sortir la nécessité des impôts, le cultivateur découragé quitter son champ même durant la paix et laisser la charrue pour ceindre l’épée. On verrait naître les règles funestes et bizarres du point d’honneur. On verrait les défenseurs de la patrie en devenir tôt ou tard les ennemis, tenir sans cesse le poignard levé sur leurs concitoyens, et il viendrait un temps où l’on les entendrait dire à l’oppresseur de leur pays:\n\nPectore si fratris gladium juguloque parentis\n\nCondere me jubeas, gravidae que in viscera a partu\n\nConjugis, invitâ peragam tamen omnia dextrâ.\n\nDe l’extrême inégalité des conditions et des fortunes, de la diversité des passions et des talents, des arts inutiles, des arts pernicieux, des sciences frivoles sortiraient des foules de préjugés, également contraires à la raison, au bonheur et à la vertu. On verrait fomenter par les chefs tout ce qui peut affaiblir des hommes rassemblés en les désunissant; tout ce qui peut donner à la société un air de concorde apparente et y semer un germe de division réelle; tout ce qui peut inspirer aux différents ordres une défiance et une haine mutuelle par l’opposition de leurs droits et de leurs intérêts, et fortifier par conséquent le pouvoir qui les contient tous.\n\nC’est du sein de ce désordre et de ces révolutions que le despotisme, élevant par degrés sa tête hideuse et dévorant tout ce qu’il aurait aperçu de bon et de sain dans toutes les parties de l’État, parviendrait enfin à fouler aux pieds les lois et le peuple, et à s’établir sur les ruines de la république. Les temps qui précéderaient ce dernier changement seraient des temps de troubles et de calamités, mais à la fin tout serait englouti par le monstre et les peuples n’auraient plus de chefs ni de lois, mais seulement des tyrans. Dès cet instant aussi il cesserait d’être question de mœurs et de vertu; car partout où règne le despotisme, cui ex honesto nulla est spes, il ne souffre aucun autre maître; sitôt qu’il parle, il n’y a ni probité ni devoir à consulter, et la plus aveugle obéissance est la seule vertu qui reste aux esclaves.\n\nC’est ici le dernier terme de l’inégalité, et le point extrême qui ferme le cercle et touche au point d’où nous sommes partis. C’est ici que tous les particuliers redeviennent égaux parce qu’ils ne sont rien, et que les sujets n’ayant plus d’autre loi que la volonté du maître, ni le maître d’autre règle que ses passions, les notions du bien et les principes de la justice s’évanouissent derechef. C’est ici que tout se ramène à la seule loi du plus fort et par conséquent à un nouvel état de nature différent de celui par lequel nous avons commencé, en ce que l’un était l’état de nature dans sa pureté, et que ce dernier est le fruit d’un excès de corruption. Il y a si peu de différence d’ailleurs entre ces deux états et le contrat de gouvernement est tellement dissous par le despotisme que le despote n’est le maître qu’aussi longtemps qu’il est le plus fort et que, sitôt qu’on peut l’expulser, il n’a point à réclamer contre la violence. L’émeute qui finit par étrangler ou détrôner un sultan est un acte aussi juridique que ceux par lesquels il disposait la veille des vies et des biens de ses sujets. La seule force le maintenait, la seule force le renverse; toutes choses se passent ainsi selon l’ordre naturel, et quel que puisse être l’événement de ces courtes et fréquentes révolutions, nul ne peut se plaindre de l’injustice d’autrui, mais seulement de sa propre imprudence, ou de son malheur.\n\nEn découvrant et suivant ainsi les routes oubliées et perdues qui de l’état naturel ont dû mener l’homme à l’état civil, en rétablissant, avec les positions intermédiaires que je viens de marquer, celles que le temps qui me presse m’a fait supprimer, ou que l’imagination ne m’a point suggérées, tout lecteur attentif ne pourra qu’être frappé de l’espace immense qui sépare ces deux états. C’est dans cette lente succession des choses qu’il verra la solution d’une infinité de problèmes de morale et de politique que les philosophes ne peuvent résoudre. Il sentira que le genre humain d’un âge n’étant pas le genre humain d’un autre âge, la raison pour quoi Diogène ne trouvait point d’homme, c’est qu’il cherchait parmi ses contemporains l’homme d’un temps qui n’était plus: Caton, dira-t-il, périt avec Rome et la liberté, parce qu’il fut déplacé dans son siècle, et le plus grand des hommes ne fit qu’étonner le monde qu’il eût gouverné cinq cents ans plus tôt. En un mot, il expliquera comment l’âme et les passions humaines, s’altérant insensiblement, changent pour ainsi dire de nature; pourquoi nos besoins et nos plaisirs changent d’objets à la longue; pourquoi, l’homme originel s’évanouissant par degrés, la société n’offre plus aux yeux du sage qu’un assemblage d’hommes artificiels et de passions factices qui sont l’ouvrage de toutes ces nouvelles relations et n’ont aucun vrai fondement dans la nature. Ce que la réflexion nous apprend là-dessus, l’observation le confirme parfaitement: l’homme sauvage et l’homme policé diffèrent tellement par le fond du cœur et des inclinations que ce qui fait le bonheur suprême de l’un réduirait l’autre au désespoir. Le premier ne respire que le repos et la liberté, il ne veut que vivre et rester oisif, et l’ataraxie même du stoïcien n’approche pas de sa profonde indifférence pour tout autre objet. Au contraire, le citoyen toujours actif sue, s’agite, se tourmente sans cesse pour chercher des occupations encore plus laborieuses: il travaille jusqu’à la mort, il y court même pour se mettre en état de vivre, ou renonce à la vie pour acquérir l’immortalité. Il fait sa cour aux grands qu’il hait et aux riches qu’il méprise; il n’épargne rien pour obtenir l’honneur de les servir; il se vante orgueilleusement de sa bassesse et de leur protection et, fier de son esclavage, il parle avec dédain de ceux qui n’ont pas l’honneur de le partager. Quel spectacle pour un Caraïbe que les travaux pénibles et enviés d’un ministre européen! Combien de morts cruelles ne préférerait pas cet indolent sauvage à l’horreur d’une pareille vie qui souvent n’est pas même adoucie par le plaisir de bien faire? Mais pour voir le but de tant de soins, il faudrait que ces mots, puissance et réputation, eussent un sens dans son esprit, qu’il apprît qu’il y a une sorte d’hommes qui comptent pour quelque chose les regards du reste de l’univers, qui savent être heureux et contents d’eux-mêmes sur le témoignage d’autrui plutôt que sur le leur propre. Telle est, en effet, la véritable cause de toutes ces différences: le sauvage vit en lui-même; l’homme sociable toujours hors de lui ne fait vivre que dans l’opinion des autres, et c’est, pour ainsi dire, de leur seul jugement qu’il tire le sentiment de sa propre existence. Il n’est pas de mon sujet de montrer comment d’une telle disposition naît tant d’indifférence pour le bien et le mal, avec de si beaux discours de morale; comment, tout se réduisant aux apparences, tout devient factice et joué; honneur, amitié, vertu, et souvent jusqu’aux vices mêmes, dont on trouve enfin le secret de se glorifier; comment, en un mot, demandant toujours aux autres ce que nous sommes et n’osant jamais nous interroger là-dessus nous-mêmes, au milieu de tant de philosophie, d’humanité, de politesse et de maximes sublimes, nous n’avons qu’un extérieur trompeur et frivole, de l’honneur sans vertu, de la raison sans sagesse, et du plaisir sans bonheur. Il me suffit d’avoir prouvé que ce n’est point là l’état originel de l’homme et que c’est le seul esprit de la société et l’inégalité qu’elle engendre qui changent et altèrent ainsi toutes nos inclinations naturelles.\n\nJ’ai tâché d’exposer l’origine et le progrès de l’inégalité, l’établissement et l’abus des sociétés politiques, autant que ces choses peuvent se déduire de la nature de l’homme par les seules lumières de la raison, et indépendamment des dogmes sacrés qui donnent à l’autorité souveraine la sanction du droit divin. Il suit de cet exposé que l’inégalité, étant presque nulle dans l’état de nature, tire sa force et son accroissement du développement de nos facultés et des progrès de l’esprit humain et devient enfin stable et légitime par l’établissement de la propriété et des lois. Il suit encore que l’inégalité morale, autorisée par le seul droit positif, est contraire au droit naturel, toutes les fois qu’elle ne concourt pas en même proportion avec l’inégalité physique; distinction qui détermine suffisamment ce qu’on doit penser à cet égard de la sorte d’inégalité qui règne parmi tous les peuples policés; puisqu’il est manifestement contre la Loi de Nature, de quelque manière qu’on la définisse, qu’un enfant commande à un vieillard, qu’un imbécile conduise un homme sage, et qu’une poignée de gens regorge de superfluités, tandis que la multitude affamée manque du nécessaire.\n\n### Notes, 1\n\nNOTES\n\nNote 1\n\nHérodote raconte qu’après le meurtre du faux Smerdis, les sept libérateurs de la Perse s’étant assemblés pour délibérer sur la forme de gouvernement qu’ils donneraient à l’État, Otanès opina fortement pour la république; avis d’autant plus extraordinaire dans la bouche d’un satrape qu’outre la prétention qu’il pouvait avoir à l’empire, les Grands craignent plus que la mort une sorte de gouvernement qui les force à respecter les hommes. Otanès, comme on peut bien croire, ne fut pointé écouté et, voyant qu’on allait procéder à l’élection d’un monarque, lui qui ne voulait ni obéir ni commander, céda volontairement aux autres concurrents son droit à la couronne, demandant pour tout dédommagement d’être libre et indépendant, lui et sa postérité, ce qui lui fut accordé. Quand Hérodote ne nous apprendrait pas la restriction qui fut mise à ce privilège, il faudrait nécessairement la supposer; autrement Otanès, ne reconnaissant aucune sorte de loi et n’ayant de compte à rendre à personne, aurait été tout-puissant dans l’État et plus puissant que le roi même. Mais il n’y avait guère d’apparence qu’un homme capable de se contenter en pareil cas d’un tel privilège fût capable d’en abuser. En effet, on ne voit pas que ce droit ait jamais causé le moindre trouble dans le royaume, ni par le sage Otanès, ni aucun de ses descendants.\n\nNote 2\n\nb Dès mon premier pas je m’appuie avec confiance sur une de ces autorités respectables pour les philosophes, parce qu’elles viennent d’une raison solide et sublime qu’eux seuls savent trouver et sentir.\n\n« Quelque intérêt que nous ayons à nous connaître nous-mêmes, je ne sais si nous ne connaissons pas mieux tout ce qui n’est pas nous. Pourvus par la nature d’organes uniquement destinés à notre conservation, nous ne les employons qu’à recevoir les impressions étrangères, nous ne cherchons qu’à nous répandre au-dehors, et à exister hors de nous; trop occupés à multiplier les fonctions de nos sens et à augmenter l’étendue extérieure de notre être, rarement faisons-nous usage de ce sens intérieur qui nous réduit à nos vraies dimensions et qui sépare de nous tout ce qui n’en est pas. C’est cependant de ce sens dont il faut nous servir, si nous voulons nous connaître; c’est le seul par lequel nous puissions nous juger. Mais comment donner à ce sens son activité et toute son étendue? Comment dégager notre âme, dans laquelle il réside, de toutes les illusions de notre esprit? Nous avons perdu l’habitude de l’employer, elle est demeurée sans exercice au milieu du tumulte de nos sensations corporelles, elle s’est desséchée par le feu de nos passions; le cœur, l’esprit, le sens, tout a travaillé contre elle. » Hist. Nat. T4, p. 151, De la Nat. de l’homme.\n\nNote 3\n\nLes changements qu’un long usage de marcher sur deux pieds a pu produire dans la conformation de l’homme, les rapports qu’on observe encore entre ses bras et les jambes antérieures des quadrupèdes et l’induction tirée de leur manière de marcher ont pu faire naître des doutes sur celle qui devait nous être la plus naturelle. Tous les enfants commencent par marcher à quatre pieds et ont besoin de notre exemple et de nos leçons pour apprendre à se tenir debout. Il y a même des nations sauvages, telles que les Hottentots qui, négligeant beaucoup les enfants, les laissent marcher sur les mains si longtemps qu’ils ont ensuite bien de la peine à les redresser; autant en font les enfants des Caraïbes des Antilles. Il y a divers exemples d’hommes quadrupèdes et je pourrais entre autres citer celui de cet enfant qui fut trouvé, en 1344, auprès de Hesse où il avait été nourri par des loups et qui disait depuis à la cour du prince Henri que, s’il n’eût tenu qu’à lui, il eût mieux aimé retourner avec eux que de vivre parmi les hommes. Il avait tellement pris l’habitude de marcher comme ces animaux qu’il fallut lui attacher des pièces de bois qui le forçaient à se tenir debout et en équilibre sur ses deux pieds. Il en était de même de l’enfant qu’on trouva en 1694 dans les forêts de Lituanie et qui vivait parmi les ours. Il ne donnait, dit M. de Condillac, aucune marque de raison, marchait sur ses pieds et sur ses mains, n’avait aucun langage et formait des sons qui ne ressemblaient en rien à ceux d’un homme. Le petit sauvage d’Hanovre qu’on mena il y a plusieurs années à la cour d’Angleterre, avait toutes les peines du monde à s’assujettir à marcher sur deux pieds et l’on trouva en 1719 deux autres sauvages dans les Pyrénées, qui couraient par les montagnes à la manière des quadrupèdes. Quant à ce qu’on pourrait objecter que c’est se priver de l’usage des mains dont nous tirons tant d’avantages, outre que l’exemple des singes montre que la main peut fort bien être employée des deux manières, cela prouverait seulement que l’homme peut donner à ses membres une destination plus commode que celle de la nature, et non que la nature a destiné l’homme à marcher autrement qu’elle ne lui enseigne.\n\nMais il y a, ce me semble, de beaucoup meilleures raisons, à dire pour soutenir que l’homme est un bipède. Premièrement quand on ferait voir qu’il a pu d’abord être conformé autrement que nous le voyons et cependant devenir enfin ce qu’il est, ce n’en serait pas assez pour conclure que cela se soit fait ainsi. Car, après avoir montré la possibilité de ces changements, il faudrait encore, avant que de les admettre, en montrer au moins la vraisemblance. De plus, si les bras de l’homme paraissent avoir pu lui servir de jambes au besoin, c’est la seule observation favorable à ce système, sur un grand nombre d’autres qui lui sont contraires. Les principales sont: que la manière dont la tête de l’homme est attachée à son corps, au lieu de diriger sa vue horizontalement, comme l’ont tous les autres animaux, et comme il l’a lui-même en marchant debout, lui eût tenu, marchant à quatre pieds, les yeux directement fichés vers la terre, situation très peu favorable à la conservation de l’individu; que la queue qui lui manque, et dont il n’a que faire marchant à deux pieds, est utile aux quadrupèdes, et qu’aucun d’eux n’en est privé; que le sein de la femme, très bien situé pour un bipède qui tient son enfant dans ses bras, l’est si mal pour un quadrupède que nul ne l’a placé de cette manière; que le train de derrière étant d’une excessive hauteur à proportion des jambes de devant, ce qui fait que marchant à quatre nous nous traînons sur les genoux, le tout eût fait un animal mal proportionné et marchant peu commodément; que s’il eût posé le pied à plat ainsi que la main, il aurait eu dans la jambe postérieure une articulation de moins que les autres animaux, savoir celle qui joint le canon au tibia, et qu’en ne posant que la pointe du pied, comme il aurait sans doute été contraint de faire, le tarse, sans parler de la pluralité des os qui le composent, paraît trop gros pour tenir lieu de canon et ses articulations avec le métatarse et le tibia trop rapprochées pour donner à la jambe humaine dans cette situation la même flexibilité qu’ont celles des quadrupèdes. L’exemple des enfants étant pris dans un âge où les forces naturelles ne sont point encore développées ni les membres raffermis, ne conclut rien du tout et j’aimerais autant dire que les chiens ne sont pas destinés à marcher, parce qu’ils ne font que ramper quelques semaines après leur naissance. Les faits particuliers ont encore peu de force contre la pratique universelle de tous les hommes, même des nations qui, n’ayant eu aucune communication avec les autres, n’avaient pu rien imiter d’elles. Un enfant abandonné dans une forêt avant que de pouvoir marcher, et nourri par quelque bête, aura suivi l’exemple de sa nourrice en s’exerçant à marcher comme elle; l’habitude lui aura pu donner des facilités qu’il ne tenait point de la nature; et comme des manchots parviennent à force d’exercice à faire avec leurs pieds tout ce que nous faisons de nos mains, il sera parvenu enfin à employer ses mains à l’usage des pieds.\n\nNote 4\n\nS’il se trouvait parmi mes lecteurs quelque assez mauvais physicien pour me faire des difficultés sur la supposition de cette fertilité naturelle de la terre, je vais lui répondre par le passage suivant:\n\n« Comme les végétaux tirent pour leur nourriture beaucoup plus de substance de l’air et de l’eau qu’ils n’en tirent de la terre, il arrive qu’en pourrissant ils rendent à la terre plus qu’ils n’en ont tiré; d’ailleurs une forêt détermine les eaux de la pluie en arrêtant les vapeurs. Ainsi dans un bois que l’on conserverait bien longtemps sans y toucher, la couche de terre qui sert à la végétation augmenterait considérablement; mais les animaux rendant moins à la terre qu’ils n’en tirent, et les hommes faisant des consommations énormes de bois et de plantes pour le feu et pour d’autres usages, il s’ensuit que la couche de terre végétale d’un pays habité doit toujours diminuer et devenir enfin comme le terrain de l’Arabie Pétrée, et comme celui de tant d’autres provinces de l’Orient, qui est en effet le climat le plus anciennement habité, où l’on ne trouve que du sel et des sables, car le sel fixe des plantes et des animaux reste, tandis que toutes les autres parties se volatilisent. » M. de Buffon, Hist. Nat.\n\nOn peut ajouter à cela la preuve de fait par la quantité d’arbres et de plantes de toute espèce, dont étaient remplies presque toutes les îles désertes qui ont été découvertes dans ces derniers siècles, et par ce que l’Histoire nous apprend des forêts immenses qu’il a fallu abattre par toute la terre à mesure qu’elle s’est peuplée et policée. Sur quoi je ferai encore les trois remarques suivantes. L’une que s’il y a une sorte de végétaux qui puissent compenser la déperdition de matière végétale qui se fait par les animaux, selon le raisonnement de M. de Buffon, ce sont surtout les bois, dont les têtes et les feuilles rassemblent et s’approprient plus d’eaux et de vapeurs que ne font les autres plantes. La seconde, que la destruction du sol, c’est-à-dire la perte de la substance propre à la végétation doit s’accélérer à proportion que la terre est plus cultivée et que les habitants plus industrieux consomment en plus grande abondance ses productions de toute espèce. Ma troisième et plus importante remarque est que les fruits des arbres fournissent à l’animal une nourriture plus abondante que ne peuvent faire les autres végétaux, expérience que j’ai faite moi-même, en comparant les produits de deux terrains égaux en grandeur et en qualité, l’un couvert de châtaigniers et l’autre semé de blé.\n\nNote 5\n\nParmi les quadrupèdes, les deux distinctions les plus universelles des espèces voraces se tirent, l’une de la figure des dents, et l’autre de la conformation des intestins. Les animaux qui ne vivent que de végétaux ont tous les dents plates, comme le cheval, le bœuf, le mouton, le lièvre, mais les voraces les ont pointues, comme le chat, le chien, le loup, le renard. Et quant aux intestins, les frugivores en ont quelques-uns, tels que le côlon, qui ne se trouvent pas dans les animaux voraces. Il semble donc que l’homme, ayant les dents et les intestins comme les ont les animaux frugivores, devrait naturellement être rangé dans cette classe, et non seulement les observations anatomiques confirment cette opinion: mais les monuments de l’antiquité y sont encore très favorables. « Dicéarque, dit saint Jérôme, rapporte dans ses Livres des antiquités grecques que sous le règne de Saturne, où la terre était encore fertile par elle-même, nul homme ne mangeait de chair, mais que tous vivaient des fruits et des légumes qui croissaient naturellement. » (Lib. 2, Adv. Jovinian.) On peut voir par là que je néglige bien des avantages que je pourrais faire valoir. Car la proie étant presque l’unique sujet de combat entre les animaux carnassiers, et les frugivores vivant entre eux dans une paix continuelle, si l’espèce humaine était de ce dernier genre, il est clair qu’elle aurait eu beaucoup plus de facilité à subsister dans l’état de nature, beaucoup moins de besoin et d’occasions d’en sortir.\n\nNote 6\n\nToutes les connaissances qui demandent de la réflexion, toutes celles qui ne s’acquièrent que par l’enchaînement des idées et ne se perfectionnent que successivement, semblent être tout à fait hors de la portée de l’homme sauvage, faute de communication avec ses semblables, c’est-à-dire faute de l’instrument qui sert à cette communication et des besoins qui la rendent nécessaire. Son savoir et son industrie se bornent à sauter, courir, se battre, lancer une pierre, escalader un arbre. Mais s’il ne fait que ces choses, en revanche il les fait beaucoup mieux que nous, qui n’en avons pas le même besoin que lui; et comme elles dépendent uniquement de l’exercice du corps et ne sont susceptibles d’aucune communication ni d’aucun progrès d’un individu à l’autre, le premier homme a pu y être tout aussi habile que ses derniers descendants.\n\nLes relations des voyageurs sont pleines d’exemples de la force et de la vigueur des hommes chez les nations barbares et sauvages; elles ne vantent guère moins leur adresse et leur légèreté; et comme il ne faut que des yeux pour observer ces choses, rien n’empêche qu’on n’ajoute foi à ce que certifient là-dessus des témoins oculaires, j’en tire au hasard quelques exemples des premiers livres qui me tombent sous la main.\n\n### Notes, 2\n\n« Les Hottentots, dit Kolben, entendent mieux la pêche que les Européens du Cap. Leur habileté est égale au filet, à l’hameçon et au dard, dans les anses comme dans les rivières. Ils ne prennent pas moins habilement le poisson avec la main. Ils sont d’une adresse incomparable à la nage. Leur manière de nager a quelque chose de surprenant et qui leur est tout à fait propre. Ils nagent le corps droit et les mains étendues hors de l’eau, de sorte qu’ils paraissent marcher sur la terre. Dans la plus grande agitation de la mer et lorsque les flots forment autant de montagnes, ils dansent en quelque sorte sur le dos des vagues, montant et descendant comme un morceau de liège. » « Les Hottentots, dit encore le même auteur, sont d’une adresse surprenante à la chasse, et la légèreté de leur course passe l’imagination. » Il s’étonne qu’ils ne fassent pas plus souvent un mauvais usage de leur agilité, ce qui leur arrive pourtant quelquefois, comme on peut juger par l’exemple qu’il en donne: « Un matelot hollandais en débarquant au Cap chargea, dit-il, un Hottentot de le suivre à la ville avec un rouleau de tabac d’environ vingt livres. Lorsqu’ils furent tous deux à quelque distance de la troupe, le Hottentot demanda au matelot s’il savait courir. Courir! répond le Hollandais, oui, fort bien. Voyons, reprit l’Africain, et fuyant avec le tabac il disparut presque aussitôt. Le matelot confondu de cette merveilleuse vitesse ne pensa point à le poursuivre et ne revit jamais ni son tabac ni son porteur.\n\nIls ont la vue si prompte et la main si certaine que les Européens n’en approchent point. À cent pas, ils toucheront d’un coup de pierre une marque de la grandeur d’un demi-sol et ce qu’il y a de plus étonnant, c’est qu’au lieu de fixer comme nous les yeux sur le but, ils font des mouvements et des contorsions continuelles. Il semble que leur pierre soit portée par une main invisible. » Le P. du Tertre dit à peu près sur les sauvages des Antilles les mêmes choses qu’on vient de lire sur les Hottentots du cap de Bonne-Espérance. Il vante surtout leur justesse à tirer avec leurs flèches les oiseaux au vol et les poissons à la nage, qu’ils prennent ensuite en plongeant. Les sauvages de l’Amérique septentrionale ne sont pas moins célèbres par leur force et leur adresse, et voici un exemple qui pourra faire juger de celles des Indiens de l’Amérique méridionale. En l’année 1746, un Indien de Buenos Aires, ayant été condamné aux galères à Cadix, proposa au gouverneur de racheter sa liberté en exposant sa vie dans une fête publique. Il promit qu’il attaquerait seul le plus furieux taureau sans autre arme en main qu’une corde, qu’il le terrasserait, qu’il le saisirait avec sa corde par telle partie qu’on indiquerait, qu’il le sellerait, le briderait, le monterait, et combattrait, ainsi monté, deux autres taureaux des plus furieux qu’on ferait sortir du torillo et qu’il les mettrait tous à mort l’un après l’autre, dans l’instant qu’on le lui commanderait et sans le secours de personne; ce qui lui fut accordé. L’Indien tint parole et réussit dans tout ce qu’il avait promis; sur la manière dont il s’y prit et sur tout le détail du combat, on peut consulter le premier tome in-12 des Observations sur l’Histoire naturelle de M. Gautier, d’où ce fait est tiré, page 262.\n\nNote 7\n\n« La durée de la vie des chevaux, dit M. de Buffon, est comme dans toutes les autres espèces d’animaux proportionnée à la durée du temps de leur accroissement. L’homme, qui est quatorze ans à croître, peut vivre six ou sept fois autant de temps, c’est-à-dire quatre-vingt-dix ou cent ans, le cheval, dont l’accroissement se fait en quatre ans, peut vivre six ou sept fois autant, c’est-à-dire vingt-cinq ou trente ans. Les exemples qui pourraient être contraires à cette règle sont si rares qu’on ne doit pas même les regarder comme une exception dont on puisse tirer des conséquences; et comme les gros chevaux prennent leur accroissement en moins de temps que les chevaux fins, ils vivent aussi moins de temps et sont vieux dès l’âge de quinze ans. »\n\nNote 8\n\nJe crois voir entre les animaux carnassiers et les frugivores une autre différence encore plus générale que celle que j’ai remarquée dans la note de la page 163 puisque celle-ci s’étend jusqu’aux oiseaux. Cette différence consiste dans le nombre des petits, qui n’excède jamais deux à chaque portée, pour les espèces qui ne vivent que de végétaux et qui va ordinairement au-delà de ce nombre pour les animaux voraces. Il est aisé de connaître à cet égard la destination de la nature par le nombre des mamelles, qui n’est que de deux dans chaque femelle de la première espèce, comme la jument, la vache, la chèvre, la biche, la brebis, etc., et qui est toujours de six ou de huit dans les autres femelles comme la chienne, la chatte, la louve, la tigresse, etc. La poule, l’oie, la cane, qui sont toutes des oiseaux voraces ainsi que l’aigle, l’épervier, la chouette, pondent aussi et couvent un grand nombre d’œufs, ce qui n’arrive jamais à la colombe, à la tourterelle ni aux oiseaux, qui ne mangent absolument que du grain, lesquels ne pondent et ne couvent guère que deux œufs à la fois. La raison qu’on peut donner de cette différence est que les animaux qui ne vivent que d’herbes et de plantes, demeurant presque tout le jour à la pâture et étant forcés d’employer beaucoup de temps à se nourrir, ne pourraient suffire à allaiter plusieurs petits, au lieu que les voraces faisant leur repas presque en un instant peuvent plus aisément et plus souvent retourner à leurs petits et à leur chasse et réparer la dissipation d’une si grande quantité de lait. Il y aurait à tout ceci bien des observations particulières et des réflexions à faire; mais ce n’en est pas ici le lieu et il me suffit d’avoir montré dans cette partie le système le plus général de la nature, système qui fournit une nouvelle raison de tirer l’homme de la classe des animaux carnassiers et de le ranger parmi les espèces frugivores.\n\nNote 9\n\nUn auteur célèbre, calculant les biens et les maux de la vie humaine et comparant les deux sommes, a trouvé que la dernière surpassait l’autre de beaucoup et qu’à tout prendre la vie était pour l’homme un assez mauvais présent. Je ne suis point surpris de sa conclusion; il a tiré tous ses raisonnements de la constitution de l’homme civil: s’il fût remonté jusqu’à l’homme naturel, on peut juger qu’il eût trouvé des résultats très différents, qu’il eût aperçu que l’homme n’a guère de maux que ceux qu’il s’est donnés lui-même et que la nature eût été justifiée. Ce n’est pas sans peine que nous sommes parvenus à nous rendre si malheureux. Quand d’un côté l’on considère les immenses travaux des hommes, tant de sciences approfondies, tant d’arts inventés, tant de forces employées, des abîmes comblés, des montagnes rasées, des rochers brisés, des fleuves rendus navigables, des terres défrichées, des lacs creusés, des marais desséchés, des bâtiments énormes élevés sur la terre, la mer couverte de vaisseaux et de matelots, et que de l’autre on recherche avec un peu de méditation les vrais avantages qui ont résulté de tout cela pour le bonheur de l’espèce humaine, on ne peut qu’être frappé de l’étonnante disproportion qui règne entre ces choses, et déplorer l’aveuglement de l’homme qui, pour nourrir son fol orgueil et je ne sais quelle vaine admiration de lui-même, le fait courir avec ardeur après toutes les misères dont il est susceptible, et que la bienfaisante nature avait pris soin d’écarter de lui.\n\nLes hommes sont méchants; une triste et continuelle expérience dispense de la preuve; cependant l’homme est naturellement bon, je crois l’avoir démontré; qu’est-ce donc qui peut l’avoir dépravé à ce point sinon les changements survenus dans sa constitution, les progrès qu’il a faits et les connaissances qu’il a acquises? Qu’on admire tant qu’on voudra la société humaine, il n’en sera pas moins vrai qu’elle porte nécessairement les hommes à s’entre-haïr à proportion que leurs intérêts se croisent, à se rendre mutuellement des services apparents et à se faire en effet tous les maux imaginables. Que peut-on penser d’un commerce où la raison de chaque particulier lui dicte des maximes directement contraires à celles que la raison publique prêche au corps de la société et où chacun trouve son compte dans le malheur d’autrui? Il n’y a peut-être pas un homme aisé à qui des héritiers avides et souvent ses propres enfants ne souhaitent la mort en secret, pas un vaisseau en mer dont le naufrage ne fût une bonne nouvelle pour quelque négociant, pas une maison qu’un débiteur ne voulût voir brûler avec tous les papiers qu’elle contient; pas un peuple qui ne se réjouisse des désastres de ses voisins. C’est ainsi que nous trouvons notre avantage dans le préjudice de nos semblables, et que la perte de l’un fait presque toujours la prospérité de l’autre, mais ce qu’il y de plus dangereux encore, c’est que les calamités publiques sont l’attente et l’espoir d’une multitude de particuliers. Les uns veulent des maladies, d’autres la moralité, d’autres la guerre, d’autres la famine; j’ai vu des hommes affreux pleurer de douleur aux apparences d’une année fertile, et le grand et funeste incendie de Londres, qui coûta la vie ou les biens à tant de malheureux, fit peut-être la fortune à plus de dix mille personnes. Je sais que Montaigne blâme l’Athénien Démades d’avoir fait punir un ouvrier qui vendant fort cher des cercueils gagnait beaucoup à la mort des citoyens, mais la raison que Montaigne allègue étant qu’il faudrait punir tout le monde, il est évident qu’elle confirme les miennes. Qu’on pénètre donc au travers de nos frivoles démonstrations de bienveillance ce qui se passe au fond des cœurs et qu’on réfléchisse à ce que doit être un état de choses où tous les hommes sont forcés de se caresser et de se détruire mutuellement et où ils naissent ennemis par devoir et fourbes par intérêt. Si l’on me répond que la société est tellement constituée que chaque homme gagne à servir les autres, je répliquerai que cela serait fort bien s’il ne gagnait encore plus à leur nuire. Il n’y a point de profit si légitime qui ne soit surpassé par celui qu’on peut faire illégitimement et le tort fait au prochain est toujours plus lucratif que les services. Il ne s’agit donc plus que de trouver les moyens de s’assurer l’impunité, et c’est à quoi les puissants emploient toutes leurs forces, et les faibles toutes leurs ruses.\n\nL’homme sauvage, quand il a dîné, est en paix avec toute la nature, et l’ami de tous ses semblables. S’agit-il quelquefois de disputer son repas? Il n’en vient jamais aux coups sans avoir auparavant comparé la difficulté de vaincre avec celle de trouver ailleurs sa subsistance et comme l’orgueil ne se mêle pas du combat, il se termine par quelques coups de poing. Le vainqueur mange, le vaincu va chercher fortune, et tout est pacifié, mais chez l’homme en société, ce sont bien d’autres affaires; il s’agit premièrement de pourvoir au nécessaire, et puis au superflu; ensuite viennent les délices, et puis les immenses richesses, et puis des sujets, et puis des esclaves; il n’a pas un moment de relâche; ce qu’il y a de plus singulier, c’est que moins les besoins sont naturels et pressants, plus les passions augmentent, et, qui pis est, le pouvoir de les satisfaire; de sorte qu’après de longues prospérités, après avoir englouti bien des trésors et désolé bien des hommes, mon héros finira par tout égorger jusqu’à ce qu’il soit l’unique maître de l’univers. Tel est en abrégé le tableau moral, sinon de la vie humaine, au moins des prétentions secrètes du cœur de tout homme civilisé.\n\nComparez sans préjugés l’état de l’homme civil avec celui de l’homme sauvage et recherchez, si vous le pouvez, combien, outre sa méchanceté, ses besoins et ses misères, le premier a ouvert de nouvelles portes à la douleur à la mort. Si vous considérez les peines d’esprit qui nous consument, les passions violentes qui nous épuisent et nous désolent, les travaux excessifs dont les pauvres sont surchargés, la mollesse encore plus dangereuse à laquelle les riches s’abandonnent, et qui font mourir les uns de leurs besoins et les autres de leurs excès, si vous songez aux monstrueux mélanges des aliments, à leurs pernicieux assaisonnements, aux denrées corrompues, aux drogues falsifiées, aux friponneries de ceux qui les vendent, aux erreurs de ceux qui les administrent, au poison des vaisseaux dans lesquels on les prépare, si vous faites attention aux maladies épidémiques engendrées par le mauvais air parmi des multitudes d’hommes rassemblés, à celles qu’occasionnent la délicatesse de notre manière de vivre, les passages alternatifs de l’intérieur de nos maisons au grand air, l’usage des habillements pris ou quittés avec trop peu de précaution, et tous les soins que notre sensualité excessive a tournés en habitudes nécessaires et dont la négligence ou la privation nous coûte ensuite la vie ou la santé, si vous mettez en ligne de compte les incendies et les tremblements de terre qui, consumant ou renversant des villes entières, en font périr les habitants par milliers, en un mot, si vous réunissez les dangers que toutes ces causes assemblent continuellement sur nos têtes, vous sentirez combien la nature nous fait payer cher le mépris que nous avons fait de ses leçons.\n\n### Notes, 3\n\nJe ne répéterai point ici sur la guerre ce que j’en ai dit ailleurs; mais je voudrais que les gens instruits voulussent ou osassent donner une fois au public le détail des horreurs qui se commettent dans les armées par les entrepreneurs des vivres et des hôpitaux, on verrait que leurs manœuvres non trop secrètes par lesquelles les plus brillantes armées se fondent en moins de rien font plus périr de soldats que n’en moissonne le fer ennemi. C’est encore un calcul non moins étonnant que celui des hommes que la mer engloutit tous les ans, soit par la faim, soit par le scorbut, soit par les pirates, soit par le feu, soit par les naufrages. Il est clair qu’il faut mettre aussi sur le compte de la propriété établie, et par conséquent de la société, les assassinats, les empoisonnements, les vols de grands chemins et les punitions mêmes de ces crimes, punitions nécessaires pour prévenir de plus grands maux, mais qui, pour le meurtre d’un homme coûtant la vie à deux ou davantage, ne laissent pas de doubler réellement la perte de l’espèce humaine. Combien de moyens honteux d’empêcher la naissance des hommes et de tromper la nature? Soit par ces goûts brutaux et dépravés qui insultent son plus charmant ouvrage, goûts que les sauvages ni les animaux ne connurent jamais, et qui ne sont nés dans les pays policés que d’une imagination corrompue; soit par ces avortements secrets, dignes fruits de la débauche et de l’honneur vicieux; soit par l’exposition ou le meurtre d’une multitude d’enfants, victimes de la misère de leurs parents ou de la honte barbare de leurs mères; soit enfin par la mutilation de ces malheureux dont une partie de l’existence et toute la postérité sont sacrifiées à de vaines chansons, ou, ce qui est pis encore, à la brutale jalousie de quelques hommes, mutilation qui dans ce dernier cas outrage doublement la nature, et par le traitement que reçoivent ceux qui la souffrent, et par l’usage auquel ils sont destinés. Que serait-ce si j’entreprenais de montrer l’espèce humaine attaquée dans sa source même, et jusque dans le plus saint de tous les liens, où l’on n’ose plus écouter la nature qu’après avoir consulté la fortune et où, le désordre civil confondant les vertus et les vices, la continence devient une précaution criminelle, et le refus de donner la vie à son semblable, un acte d’humanité? Mais sans déchirer le voile qui couvre tant d’horreurs, contentons-nous d’indiquer le mal auquel d’autres doivent apporter le remède.\n\nQu’on ajoute à tout cela cette quantité de métiers malsains qui abrègent les jours ou détruisent le tempérament; tels que sont les travaux des mines, les diverses préparations des métaux, des minéraux, surtout du plomb, du cuivre, du mercure, du cobalt, de l’arsenic, du réalgar; ces autres métiers périlleux qui coûtent tous les jours la vie à quantité d’ouvriers, les uns couvreurs, d’autres charpentiers, d’autres maçons, d’autres travaillant aux carrières; qu’on réunisse, dis-je, tous ces objets, et l’on pourra voir dans l’établissement et la perfection des sociétés les raisons de la diminution de l’espèce, observée par plus d’un philosophe.\n\nLe luxe, impossible à prévenir chez des hommes avides de leurs propres commodités et de la considération des autres, achève bientôt le mal que les sociétés ont commencé, et sous prétexte de faire vivre les pauvres qu’il n’eût pas fallu faire, il appauvrit tout le reste et dépeuple l’État tôt ou tard.\n\nLe luxe est un remède beaucoup pire que le mal qu’il prétend guérir; ou plutôt, il est lui-même le pire de tous les maux, dans quelque État grand ou petit que ce puisse être, et qui, pour nourrir des foules de valets et de misérables qu’il a faits, accable et ruine le laboureur et le citoyen. Semblable à ces vents brûlants du midi qui, couvrant l’herbe et la verdure d’insectes dévorants, ôtent la subsistance aux animaux utiles et portent la disette et la mort dans tous les lieux où ils se font sentir.\n\nDe la société et du luxe qu’elle engendre, naissent les arts libéraux et mécaniques, le commerce, les lettres; et toutes ces inutilités, qui font fleurir l’industrie, enrichissent et perdent les États. La raison de ce dépérissement est très simple. Il est aisé de voir que par sa nature l’agriculture doit être le moins lucratif de tous les arts; parce que son produit étant de l’usage le plus indispensable pour tous les hommes, le prix en doit être proportionné aux facultés des plus pauvres. Du même principe on peut tirer cette règle, qu’en général les arts sont lucratifs en raison inverse de leur utilité et que les plus nécessaires doivent enfin devenir les plus négligés. Par où l’on voit ce qu’il faut penser des vrais avantages de l’industrie et de l’effet réel qui résulte de ses progrès.\n\nTelles sont les causes sensibles de toutes les misères où l’opulence précipite enfin les nations les plus admirées. À mesure que l’industrie et les arts s’étendent et fleurissent, le cultivateur, méprisé, chargé d’impôts nécessaires à l’entretien du luxe et condamné à passer sa vie entre le travail et la faim, abandonne ses champs, pour aller chercher dans les villes le pain qu’il y devrait porter. Plus les capitales frappent d’admiration les yeux stupides du peuple, plus il faudrait gémir de voir les campagnes abandonnées, les terres en friche, et les grands chemins inondés de malheureux citoyens devenus mendiants ou voleurs et destinés à finir un jour leur misère sur la roue ou sur un fumier. C’est ainsi que l’État, s’enrichissant d’un côté, s’affaiblit et se dépeuple de l’autre, et que les plus puissantes monarchies, après bien des travaux pour se rendre opulentes et désertes, finissent par devenir la proie des nations pauvres qui succombent à la funeste tentation de les envahir, et qui s’enrichissent et s’affaiblissent à leur tour, jusqu’à ce qu’elles soient elles-mêmes envahies et détruites par d’autres.\n\nQu’on daigne nous expliquer une fois ce qui avait pu produire ces nuées de barbares qui durant tant de siècles ont inondé l’Europe, l’Asie et l’Afrique? Était-ce à l’industrie de leurs arts, à la sagesse de leurs lois, à l’excellence de leur police, qu’ils devaient cette prodigieuse population? Que nos savants veuillent bien nous dire pourquoi, loin de multiplier à ce point, ces hommes féroces et brutaux, sans lumières, sans frein, sans éducation, ne s’entr’égorgeaient pas tous à chaque instant, pour se disputer leur pâture ou leur chasse? Qu’ils nous expliquent comment ces misérables ont eu seulement la hardiesse de regarder en face de si habiles gens que nous étions, avec une si belle discipline militaire, de si beaux codes, et de si sages lois? Enfin, pourquoi, depuis que la société s’est perfectionnée dans les pays du Nord et qu’on y a tant pris de peine pour appendre aux hommes leurs devoirs mutuels et l’art de vivre agréablement et paisiblement ensemble, on n’en voit plus rien sortir de semblable à ces multitudes d’hommes qu’il produisait autrefois? J’ai bien peur que quelqu’un ne s’avise à la fin de me répondre que toutes ces grandes choses, savoir les arts, les sciences et les lois, ont été très sagement inventées par les hommes, comme une peste salutaire pour prévenir l’excessive multiplication de l’espèce, de peur que ce monde, qui nous est destiné, ne devînt à la fin trop petit pour ses habitants.\n\nQuoi donc? Faut-il détruire les sociétés, anéantir le tien et le mien, et retourner vivre dans les forêts avec les ours? Conséquence à la manière de mes adversaires, que j’aime autant prévenir que de leur laisser la honte de la tirer. O vous, à qui la voix céleste ne s’est point fait entendre et qui ne reconnaissez pour votre espèce d’autre destination que d’achever en paix cette courte vie, vous qui pouvez laisser au milieu des villes vos funestes acquisitions, vos esprits inquiets, vos cœurs corrompus et vos désirs effrénés, reprenez, puisqu’il dépend de vous, votre antique et première innocence; allez dans les bois perdre la vue et la mémoire des crimes de vos contemporains et ne craignez point d’avilir votre espèce, en renonçant à ses lumières pour renoncer à ses vices. Quant aux hommes semblables à moi dont les passions ont détruit pour toujours l’originelle simplicité, qui ne peuvent plus se nourrir d’herbe et de gland, ni se passer de lois et de chefs, ceux qui furent honorés dans leur premier père de leçons surnaturelles, ceux qui verront dans l’intention de donner d’abord aux actions humaines une moralité qu’elles n’eussent de longtemps acquise, la raison d’un précepte indifférent par lui-même et inexplicable dans tout autre système; ceux, en un mot, qui sont convaincus que la voix divine appela tout le genre humain aux lumières et au bonheur des célestes intelligences, tout ceux-là tâcheront, par l’exercice des vertus qu’ils s’obligent à pratiquer en apprenant à les connaître, à mériter le prix éternel qu’ils en doivent attendre; ils respecteront les sacrés liens des sociétés dont ils sont les membres; ils aimeront leurs semblables et les serviront de tout leur pouvoir; ils obéiront scrupuleusement aux lois et aux hommes qui en sont les auteurs et les ministres, ils honoreront surtout les bons et sages princes qui sauront prévenir, guérir ou pallier cette foule d’abus et de maux toujours prêts à nous accabler, ils animeront le zèle de ces dignes chefs, en leur montrant sans crainte et sans flatterie la grandeur de leur tâche et la rigueur de leur devoir; mais ils n’en mépriseront pas moins une constitution qui ne peut se maintenir qu’à l’aide de tant de gens respectables qu’on désire plus souvent qu’on ne les obtient et de laquelle, malgré tous leurs soins, naissent toujours plus de calamités réelles que d’avantages apparents.\n\nNote 10\n\nParmi les hommes que nous connaissons, ou par nous-mêmes, ou par les historiens, ou par les voyageurs, les uns sont noirs, les autres blancs, les autres rouges; les uns portent de longs cheveux, les autres n’ont que de la laine frisée; les uns sont presque tout velus, les autres n’ont pas même de barbe; il y a eu et il y a peut-être encore des nations d’hommes d’une taille gigantesque, et laissant à part la fable des Pygmées qui peut bien n’être qu’une exagération, on sait que les Lapons et surtout les Groenlandais sont fort au-dessous de la taille moyenne de l’homme; on prétend même qu’il y a des peuples entiers qui ont des queues comme les quadrupèdes, et sans ajouter une foi aveugle aux relations d’Hérodote et de Ctésias, on en peut du moins tirer cette opinion très vraisemblable, que si l’on avait pu faire de bonnes observations dans ces temps anciens où les peuples divers suivaient des manières de vivre plus différentes entre elles qu’ils ne font aujourd’hui, on y aurait aussi remarqué dans la figure et l’habitude du corps, des variétés beaucoup plus frappantes. Tous ces faits dont il est aisé de fournir des preuves incontestables, ne peuvent surprendre que ceux qui sont accoutumés à ne regarder que les objets qui les environnent et qui ignorent les puissants effets de la diversité des climats, de l’air, des aliments, de la manière de vivre, des habitudes en général, et surtout la force étonnante des mêmes causes, quand elles agissent continuellement sur de longues suites de générations. Aujourd’hui que le commerce, les voyages et les conquêtes réunissent davantage les peuples divers, et que leurs manières de vivre se rapprochent sans cesse par la fréquente communication, on s’aperçoit que certaines différences nationales ont diminué, et par exemple, chacun peut remarquer que les Français d’aujourd’hui ne sont plus ces grands corps blancs et blonds décrits par les historiens latins, quoique le temps joint au mélange des Francs et des Normands, blancs et blonds eux-mêmes, eût dû rétablir ce que la fréquentation des Romains avait pu ôter à l’influence du climat, dans la constitution naturelle et le teint des habitants. Toutes ces observations sur les variétés que mille causes peuvent produire et ont produit en effet dans l’espèce humaine me font douter si divers animaux semblables aux hommes, pris par les voyageurs pour des bêtes sans beaucoup d’examen, ou à cause de quelques différences qu’ils remarquaient dans la conformation extérieure, ou seulement parce que ces animaux ne parlaient pas, ne seraient point en effet de véritables hommes sauvages, dont la race dispersée anciennement dans les bois n’avait eu occasion de développer aucune de ses facultés virtuelles, n’avait acquis aucun degré de perfection et se trouvait encore dans l’état primitif de nature. Donnons un exemple de ce que je veux dire.\n\n« On trouve, dit le traducteur de l’Histoire des voyages, dans le royaume de Congo quantité de ces grands animaux qu’on nomme Orang-Outang aux Indes orientales, qui tiennent comme le milieu entre l’espèce humaine et les babouins. Battel raconte que dans les forêts de Mayomba au royaume de Loango, on voit deux sortes de monstres dont les plus grands se nomment Pongos et les autres Enjokos. Les premiers ont une ressemblance exacte avec l’homme; mais ils sont beaucoup plus gros, et de fort haute taille. Avec un visage humain, ils ont les yeux fort enfoncés. Leurs mains, leurs joues, leurs oreilles sont sans poil, à l’exception des sourcils qu’ils ont fort longs. Quoiqu’ils aient le reste du corps assez velu, le poil n’en est pas fort épais, et sa couleur est brune. Enfin, la seule partie qui les distingue des hommes est la jambe qu’ils ont sans mollet. Ils marchent droits en se tenant de la main le poil du cou; leur retraite est dans les bois; ils dorment sur les arbres et s’y font une espèce de toit qui les met à couvert de la pluie. Leurs aliments sont des fruits ou des noix sauvages. Jamais ils ne mangent de chair. L’usage des Nègres qui traversent les forêts est d’y allumer des feux pendant la nuit. Ils remarquent que le matin à leur départ les pongos prennent leur place autour du feu et ne se retirent pas qu’il ne soit éteint: car avec beaucoup d’adresse, ils n’ont point assez de sens pour l’entretenir en y apportant du bois. Ils marchent quelquefois en troupes et tuent les Nègres qui traversent les forêts. Ils tombent même sur les éléphants qui viennent paître dans les lieux qu’ils habitent et les incommodent si fort à coups de poing ou de bâton qu’ils les forcent à prendre la fuite en poussant des cris. On ne prend jamais de pongos en vie; parce qu’ils sont si robustes que dix hommes ne suffiraient pas pour les arrêter. Mais les Nègres en prennent quantité de jeunes après avoir tué la mère, au corps de laquelle le petit s’attache fortement: lorsqu’un de ces animaux meurt, les autres couvrent son corps d’un amas de branches ou de feuillages. Purchass ajoute que dans les conversations qu’il avait eues avec Battel, il avait appris de lui-même qu’un pongo lui enleva un petit Nègre qui passa un mois entier dans la société de ces animaux; car ils ne font aucun mal aux hommes qu’ils surprennent, du moins lorsque ceux-ci ne les regardent point, comme le petit Nègre l’avait observé. Battel n’a point décrit la seconde espèce de monstre.\n\n### Notes, 4\n\nDapper confirme que le royaume de Congo est plein de ces animaux qui portent aux Indes le nom d’orang-outang, c’est-à-dire habitants des bois, et que les Africains nomment Quojas-Morros. Cette bête, dit-il, est si semblable à l’homme qu’il est tombé dans l’esprit à quelques voyageurs qu’elle pouvait être sortie d’une femme et d’un singe: chimère que les Nègres mêmes rejettent. Un de ces animaux fut transporté de Congo en Hollande et présenté au prince d’Orange Frédéric-Henri. Il était de la hauteur d’un enfant de trois ans et d’un embonpoint médiocre, mais carré et bien proportionné, fort agile et fort vif; les jambes charnues et robustes, tout le devant du corps nu, mais le derrière couvert de poils noirs. À la première vue, son visage ressemblait à celui d’un homme, mais il avait le nez plat et recourbé; ses oreilles étaient aussi celles de l’espèce humaine; son sein, car c’était une femelle, était potelé, son nombril enfoncé, ses épaules fort bien jointes, ses mains divisées en doigts et en pouces, ses mollets et ses talons gras et charnus. Il marchait souvent droit sur ses jambes, il était capable de lever et porter des fardeaux assez lourds. Lorsqu’il voulait boire, il prenait d’une main le couvercle du pot, et tenait le fond, de l’autre. Ensuite il s’essuyait gracieusement les lèvres. Il se couchait pour dormir, la tête sur un coussin, se couvrant avec tant d’adresse qu’on l’aurait pris pour un homme au lit. Les Nègres font d’étranges récits de cet animal. Ils assurent non seulement qu’il force les femmes et les filles, mais qu’il ose attaquer des hommes armés. En un mot il y a beaucoup d’apparence que c’est le satyre des Anciens. Merolla ne parle peut-être que de ces animaux lorsqu’il raconte que les Nègres prennent quelquefois dans leurs chasses des hommes et des femmes sauvages.\n\nIl est encore parlé de ces espèces d’animaux anthropoformes dans le troisième tome de la même Histoire des voyages sous le nom de Beggos et de Mandrills; mais pour nous en tenir aux relations précédentes on trouve dans la description de ces prétendus monstres des conformités frappantes avec l’espèce humaine, et des différences moindres que celles qu’on pourrait assigner d’homme à homme. On ne voit point dans ces passages les raisons sur lesquelles les auteurs se fondent pour refuser aux animaux en question le nom d’hommes sauvages, mais il est aisé de conjecturer que c’est à cause de leur stupidité, et aussi parce qu’ils ne parlaient pas; raisons faibles pour ceux qui savent que quoique l’organe de la parole soit naturel à l’homme, la parole elle-même ne lui est pourtant pas naturelle, et qui connaissent jusqu’à quel point sa perfectibilité peut avoir élevé l’homme civil au-dessus de son état originel. Le petit nombre de lignes que contiennent ces descriptions nous peut faire juger combien ces animaux ont été mal observés et avec quels préjugés ils ont été vus. Par exemple, ils sont qualifiés de monstres, et cependant on convient qu’ils engendrent. Dans un endroit Battel dit que les pongos tuent les Nègres qui traversent les forêts, dans un autre Purchass ajoute qu’ils ne leur font aucun mal, même quand ils les surprennent; du moins lorsque les Nègres ne s’attachent pas à les regarder. Les pongos s’assemblent autour des feux allumés par les Nègres, quand ceux-ci se retirent, et se retirent à leur tour quand le feu est éteint; voilà le fait, voici maintenant le commentaire de l’observateur: Car avec beaucoup d’adresse, ils n’ont pas assez de sens pour l’entretenir en y apportant du bois. Je voudrais deviner comment Battel ou Purchass son compilateur a pu savoir que la retraite des pongos était un effet de leur bêtise plutôt que de leur volonté. Dans un climat tel que Loango, le feu n’est pas une chose fort nécessaire aux animaux, et si les Nègres en allument, c’est moins contre le froid que pour effrayer les bêtes féroces; il est donc très simple qu’après avoir été quelque temps réjouis par la flamme ou s’être bien réchauffés, les pongos s’ennuient de rester toujours à la même place et s’en aillent à leur pâture, qui demande plus de temps que s’ils mangeaient de la chair. D’ailleurs, on sait que la plupart des animaux, sans en excepter l’homme, sont naturellement paresseux, et qu’ils se refusent à toutes sortes de soins qui ne sont pas d’une absolue nécessité. Enfin il paraît fort étrange que les pongos dont on vante l’adresse et la force, les pongos qui savent enterrer leurs morts et se faire des toits de branchages, ne sachent pas pousser des tisons dans le feu. Je me souviens d’avoir vu un singe faire cette même manœuvre qu’on ne veut pas que les pongos puissent faire; il est vrai que mes idées n’étant pas alors tournées de ce côté, je fis moi-même la faute que je reproche à nos voyageurs, et je négligeai d’examiner si l’intention du singe était en effet d’entretenir le feu, ou simplement, comme je crois, d’imiter l’action d’un homme. Quoi qu’il en soit, il est bien démontré que le singe n’est pas une variété de l’homme, non seulement parce qu’il est privé de la faculté de parler, mais surtout parce qu’on est sûr que son espèce n’a point celle de se perfectionner qui est le caractère spécifique de l’espèce humaine. Expériences qui ne paraissent pas avoir été faites sur le pongo et l’orang-outang avec assez de soin pour en pouvoir tirer la même conclusion. Il y aurait pourtant un moyen par lequel, si l’orang-outang ou d’autres étaient de l’espèce humaine, les observateurs les plus grossiers pourraient s’en assurer même avec démonstration; mais outre qu’une seule génération ne suffirait pas pour cette expérience, elle doit passer pour impraticable, parce qu’il faudrait que ce qui n’est qu’une supposition fût démontré vrai, avant que l’épreuve qui devrait constater le fait pût être tentée innocemment.\n\nLes jugements précipités, et qui ne sont point le fruit d’une raison éclairée, sont sujets à donner dans l’excès. Nos voyageurs font sans façon des bêtes sous les noms de Pongos, de Mandrills, d’Orang-Outang, de ces mêmes êtres dont sous le nom de Satyres, de Faunes, de Sylvains, les Anciens faisaient des divinités. Peut-être après des recherches plus exactes trouvera-t-on que ce sont des hommes. En attendant, il me paraît qu’il y a bien autant de raison de s’en rapporter là-dessus à Merolla, religieux lettré, témoin oculaire, et qui avec toute sa naïveté ne laissait pas d’être homme d’esprit, qu’au marchand Battel, à Dapper, à Purchass, et aux autres compilateurs. Quel jugement pense-t-on qu’eussent porté de pareils observateurs sur l’enfant trouvé en 1694 dont j’ai déjà parlé ci-devant, qui ne donnait aucune marque de raison, marchait sur ses pieds et sur ses mains, n’avait aucun langage et formait des sons qui ne ressemblaient en rien à ceux d’un homme? Il fut longtemps, continue le même philosophe qui me fournit ce fait, avant de pouvoir proférer quelques paroles, encore le fit-il d’une manière barbare. Aussitôt qu’il put parler, on l’interrogea sur son premier état, mais il ne s’en souvint non plus que nous nous souvenons de ce qui nous est arrivé au berceau. Si malheureusement pour lui cet enfant fût tombé dans les mains de nos voyageurs, on ne peut douter qu’après avoir remarqué son silence et sa stupidité, ils n’eussent pris le parti de le renvoyer dans les bois ou de l’enfermer dans une ménagerie; après quoi ils en auraient savamment parlé dans de belles relations, comme d’une bête fort curieuse qui ressemblait assez à l’homme.\n\nDepuis trois ou quatre cents ans que les habitants de l’Europe inondent les autres parties du monde et publient sans cesse de nouveaux recueils de voyages et de relations, je suis persuadé que nous ne connaissons d’hommes que les seuls Européens; encore paraît-il aux préjugés ridicules qui ne sont pas éteints, même parmi les gens de lettres, que chacun ne fait guère sous le nom pompeux d’étude de l’homme que celle des hommes de son pays. Les particuliers ont beau aller et venir, il semble que la philosophie ne voyage point, aussi celle de chaque peuple est-elle peu propre pour un autre. La cause de ceci est manifeste, au moins pour les contrées éloignées: il n’y a guère que quatre sortes d’hommes qui fassent des voyages de long cours; les marins, les marchands, les soldats et les missionnaires. Or, on ne doit guère s’attendre que les trois premières classes fournissent de bons observateurs et quant à ceux de la quatrième, occupés de la vocation sublime qui les appelle, quand ils ne seraient pas sujets à des préjugés d’état comme tous les autres, on doit croire qu’ils ne se livreraient pas volontiers à des recherches qui paraissent de pure curiosité et qui les détourneraient des travaux plus importants auxquels ils se destinent. D’ailleurs, pour prêcher utilement l’Évangile, il ne faut que du zèle et Dieu donne le reste, mais pour étudier les hommes il faut des talents que Dieu ne s’engage à donner à personne et qui ne sont pas toujours le partage des saints. On n’ouvre pas un livre de voyages où l’on ne trouve des descriptions de caractères et de mœurs; mais on est tout étonné d’y voir que ces gens qui ont tant décrit de choses, n’ont dit que ce que chacun savait déjà, n’ont su apercevoir à l’autre bout du monde que ce qu’il n’eût tenu qu’à eux de remarquer sans sortir de leur rue, et que ces traits vrais qui distinguent les nations, et qui frappent les yeux faits pour voir ont presque toujours échappé aux leurs. De là est venu ce bel adage de morale, si rebattu par la tourbe philosophesque, que les hommes sont partout les mêmes, qu’ayant partout les mêmes passions et les mêmes vices, il est assez inutile de chercher à caractériser les différents peuples; ce qui est à peu près aussi bien raisonné que si l’on disait qu’on ne saurait distinguer Pierre d’avec Jacques, parce qu’ils ont tous deux un nez, une bouche et des yeux.\n\nNe verra-t-on jamais renaître ces temps heureux où les peuples ne se mêlaient point de philosopher, mais où les Platon, les Thalès et les Pythagore épris d’un ardent désir de savoir, entreprenaient les plus grands voyages uniquement pour s’instruire, et allaient au loin secouer le joug des préjugés nationaux, apprendre à connaître les hommes par leurs conformités et par leurs différences et acquérir ces connaissances universelles qui ne sont point celles d’un siècle ou d’un pays exclusivement mais qui, étant de tous les temps et de tous les lieux, sont pour ainsi dire la science commune des sages?\n\nOn admire la magnificence de quelques curieux qui ont fait ou fait faire à grands frais des voyages en Orient avec des savants et des peintres, pour y dessiner des masures et déchiffrer ou copier des inscriptions: mais j’ai peine à concevoir comment dans un siècle où l’on se pique de belles connaissances il ne se trouve pas deux hommes bien unis, riches, l’un en argent, l’autre en génie, tous deux aimant la gloire et aspirant à l’immortalité, dont l’un sacrifie vingt mille écus de son bien et l’autre dix ans de sa vie à un célèbre voyage autour du monde; pour y étudier, non toujours des pierres et des plantes, mais une fois les hommes et les mœurs, et qui, après tant de siècles employés à mesurer et considérer la maison, s’avisent enfin d’en vouloir connaître les habitants. Les académiciens qui ont parcouru les parties septentrionales de l’Europe et méridionales de l’Amérique avaient plus pour objet de les visiter en géomètres qu’en philosophes. Cependant, comme ils étaient à la fois l’un et l’autre, on ne peut pas regarder comme tout à fait inconnues les régions qui ont été vues et décrites par les La Condamine et les Maupertuis. Le joaillier Chardin, qui a voyagé comme Platon, n’a rien laissé à dire sur la Perse; la Chine paraît avoir été bien observée par les Jésuites. Kempfer donne une idée passable du peu qu’il a vu dans le Japon. À ces relations près, nous ne connaissons point les peuples des Indes orientales, fréquentées uniquement par des Européens plus curieux de remplir leurs bourses que leurs têtes. L’Afrique entière et ses nombreux habitants, aussi singuliers par leur caractère que par leur couleur, sont encore à examiner; toute la terre est couverte de nations dont nous ne connaissons que les noms, et nous nous mêlons de juger le genre humain! Supposons un Montesquieu, un Buffon, un Diderot, un Duclos, un d’Alembert, un Condillac, ou des hommes de cette trempe, voyageant pour instruire leurs compatriotes, observant et décrivant comme ils savent faire, la Turquie, l’Égypte, la Barbarie, l’empire de Maroc, la Guinée, le pays des Cafres, l’intérieur de l’Afrique et ses côtes orientales, les Malabares, le Mogol, les rives du Gange, les royaumes de Siam, de Pegu et d’Ava, la Chine, la Tartarie, et surtout le Japon; puis dans l’autre hémisphère le Mexique, le Pérou, le Chili, les Terres magellaniques, sans oublier les Patagons vrais ou faux, le Tucuman, le Paraguay s’il était possible, le Brésil, enfin les Caraïbes, la Floride et toutes les contrées sauvages, voyage le plus important de tous et celui qu’il faudrait faire avec le plus de soin; supposons que ces nouveaux Hercules, de retour de ces courses mémorables, fissent ensuite à loisir l’histoire naturelle, morale et politique, de ce qu’ils auraient vu, nous verrions nous-mêmes sortir un monde nouveau de dessous leur plume, et nous apprendrions ainsi à connaître le nôtre. Je dis que quand de pareils observateurs affirmeront d’un tel animal que c’est un homme, et d’un autre que c’est une bête, il faudra les en croire; mais ce serait une grande simplicité de s’en rapporter là-dessus à des voyageurs grossiers, sur lesquels on serait quelquefois tenté de faire la même question qu’ils se mêlent de résoudre sur d’autres animaux.\n\nNote 11\n\n### Notes, 5\n\nCela me paraît de la dernière évidence, et je ne saurais concevoir d’où nos philosophes peuvent faire naître toutes les passions qu’ils prêtent à l’homme naturel. Excepté le seul nécessaire physique, que la nature même demande, tous nos autres besoins ne sont tels que par l’habitude avant laquelle ils n’étaient point des besoins, ou par nos désirs, et l’on ne désire point ce qu’on n’est pas en état de connaître. D’où il suit que l’homme sauvage ne désirant que les choses qu’il connaît et ne connaissant que celles dont la possession est en son pouvoir ou facile à acquérir, rien ne doit être si tranquille que son âme et rien si borné que son esprit.\n\nNote 12\n\nJe trouve dans le Gouvernement civil de Locke une objection qui me paraît trop spécieuse pour qu’il me soit permis de la dissimuler. « La fin de la société entre le mâle et la femelle, dit ce philosophe, n’étant pas simplement de procréer, mais de continuer l’espèce, cette société doit durer, même après la procréation, du moins aussi longtemps qu’il est nécessaire pour la nourriture et la conservation des procréés, c’est-à-dire jusqu’à ce qu’ils soient capables de pourvoir eux-mêmes à leurs besoins. Cette règle que la sagesse infinie du Créateur a établie sur les œuvres de ses mains, nous voyons que les créatures inférieures à l’homme l’observent constamment et avec exactitude. Dans ces animaux qui vivent d’herbe, la société entre le mâle et la femelle ne dure pas plus longtemps que chaque acte de copulation, parce que les mamelles de la mère étant suffisantes pour nourrir les petits jusqu’à ce qu’ils soient capables de paître l’herbe, le mâle se contente d’engendrer et il ne se mêle plus après cela de la femelle ni des petits, à la subsistance desquels il ne peut rien contribuer. Mais au regard des bêtes de proie, la société dure plus longtemps, à cause que la mère ne pouvant pas bien pourvoir à sa subsistance propre et nourrir en même temps ses petits par sa seule proie, qui est une voie de se nourrir et plus laborieuse et plus dangereuse que n’est celle de se nourrir d’herbe, l’assistance du mâle est tout à fait nécessaire pour le maintien de leur commune famille, si l’on peut user de ce terme; laquelle jusqu’à ce qu’elle puisse aller chercher quelque proie ne saurait subsister que par les soins du mâle et de la femelle. On remarque le même dans tous les oiseaux, si l’on excepte quelques oiseaux domestiques qui se trouvent dans des lieux où la continuelle abondance de nourriture exempte le mâle du soin de nourrir les petits; on voit que pendant que les petits dans leur nid ont besoin d’aliments, le mâle et la femelle y en portent, jusqu’à ce que ces petits-là puissent voler et pourvoir à leur subsistance.\n\nEt en cela, à mon avis, consiste la principale, si ce n’est la seule raison pourquoi le mâle et la femelle dans le genre humain sont obligés à une société plus longue que n’entretiennent les autres créatures. Cette raison est que la femme est capable de concevoir et est pour l’ordinaire derechef grosse et fait un nouvel enfant, longtemps avant que le précédent soit hors d’état de se passer du secours de ses parents et puisse lui-même pourvoir à ses besoins. Ainsi un père étant obligé de prendre soin de ceux qu’il a engendrés, et de prendre ce soin-là pendant longtemps, il est aussi dans l’obligation de continuer à vivre dans la société conjugale avec la même femme de qui il les a eus, et de demeurer dans cette société beaucoup plus longtemps que les autres créatures, dont les petits pouvant subsister d’eux-mêmes, avant que le temps d’une nouvelle procréation vienne, le lien du mâle et de la femelle se rompt de lui-même et l’un et l’autre se trouvent dans une pleine liberté, jusqu’à ce que cette saison qui a coutume de solliciter les animaux à se joindre ensemble les oblige de choisir de nouvelles compagnes. Et ici l’on ne saurait admirer assez la sagesse du Créateur, qui, ayant donné à l’homme des qualités propres pour pourvoir à l’avenir aussi bien qu’au présent, a voulu et a fait en sorte que la société de l’homme durât beaucoup plus longtemps que celle du mâle et de la femelle parmi les autres créatures; afin que par là l’industrie de l’homme et de la femme fût plus excitée, et que leurs intérêts fussent mieux unis, dans la vue de faire des provisions pour leurs enfants et de leur laisser du bien: rien ne pouvant être plus préjudiciable à des enfants qu’une conjonction incertaine et vague ou une dissolution facile et fréquente de la société conjugale. »\n\nLe même amour de la vérité qui m’a fait exposer sincèrement cette objection m’excite à l’accompagner de quelques remarques, sinon pour la résoudre, au moins pour l’éclaircir.\n\na. J’observerai d’abord que les preuves morales n’ont pas une grande force en matière de physique et qu’elles servent plutôt à rendre raison des faits existants qu’à constater l’existence réelle de ces faits. Or tel est le genre de preuve que M. Locke emploie dans le passage que je viens de rapporter; car quoiqu’il puisse être avantageux à l’espèce humaine que l’union de l’homme et de la femme soit permanente, il ne s’ensuit pas que cela ait été ainsi établi par la nature, autrement il faudrait dire qu’elle a aussi institué la société civile, les arts, le commerce et tout ce qu’on prétend être utile aux hommes.\n\nb. J’ignore où M. Locke a trouvé qu’entre les animaux de proie la société du mâle et de la femelle dure plus longtemps que parmi ceux qui vivent d’herbe et que l’un aide l’autre à nourrir les petits. Car on ne voit pas que le chien, le chat, l’ours, ni le loup reconnaissent leur femelle mieux que le cheval, le bélier, le taureau, le cerf ni tous les autres quadrupèdes ne reconnaissent la leur. Il semble au contraire que, si le secours du mâle était nécessaire à la femelle pour conserver ses petits, ce serait surtout dans les espèces qui ne vivent que d’herbe, parce qu’il faut fort longtemps à la mère pour paître, et que durant tout cet intervalle elle est forcée de négliger sa portée, au lieu que la proie d’une ourse ou d’une louve est dévorée en un instant et qu’elle a, sans souffrir la faim, plus de temps pour allaiter ses petits. Ce raisonnement est confirmé par une observation sur le nombre relatif de mamelles et de petits qui distingue les espèces carnassières des frugivores et dont j’ai parlé dans la note 2 de la page 167. Si cette observation est juste et générale, la femme n’ayant que deux mamelles et ne faisant guère qu’un enfant à la fois, voilà une forte raison de plus pour douter que l’espèce humaine soit naturellement carnassière, de sorte qu’il semble que pour tirer la conclusion de Locke, il faudrait retourner tout à fait son raisonnement. Il n’y a pas plus de solidité dans la même distinction appliquée aux oiseaux. Car qui pourra se persuader que l’union du mâle et de la femelle soit plus durable parmi les vautours et les corbeaux que parmi les tourterelles? Nous avons deux espèces d’oiseaux domestiques, la cane et le pigeon, qui nous fournissent des exemples directement contraires au système de cet auteur. Le pigeon, qui ne vit que de grain, reste uni à sa femelle et ils nourrissent leurs petits en commun. Le canard, dont la voracité est connue, ne reconnaît ni sa femelle ni ses petits et n’aide en rien à leur subsistance, et parmi les poules, espèce qui n’est guère moins carnassière, on ne voit pas que le coq se mette aucunement en peine de la couvée. Que si dans d’autres espèces le mâle partage avec la femelle le soin de nourrir les petits, c’est que les oiseaux qui d’abord ne peuvent voler et que la mère ne peut allaiter sont beaucoup moins en état de se passer de l’assistance du père que les quadrupèdes à qui suffit la mamelle de la mère, au moins durant quelque temps.\n\nc. Il y a bien de l’incertitude sur le fait principal qui sert de base à tout le raisonnement de M. Locke. Car, pour savoir si, comme il le prétend, dans le pur état de nature la femme est pour l’ordinaire derechef grosse et fait un nouvel enfant longtemps avant que le précédent puisse pourvoir lui-même à ses besoins, il faudrait des expériences qu’assurément Locke n’avait pas faites et que personne n’est à portée de faire. La cohabitation continuelle du mari et de la femme est une occasion si prochaine de s’exposer à une nouvelle grossesse qu’il est bien difficile de croire que la rencontre fortuite ou la seule impulsion du tempérament produisît des effets aussi fréquents dans le pur état de nature que dans celui de la société conjugale; lenteur qui contribuerait peut-être à rendre les enfants plus robustes, et qui d’ailleurs pourrait être compensée par la faculté de concevoir, prolongée dans un plus grand âge chez les femmes qui en auraient moins abusé dans leur jeunesse. À l’égard des enfants, il y a bien des raisons de croire que leurs forces et leurs organes se développèrent plus tard parmi nous qu’ils ne faisaient dans l’état primitif dont je parle. La faiblesse originelle qu’ils tirent de la constitution des parents, les soins qu’on prend d’envelopper et gêner tous leurs membres, la mollesse dans laquelle ils sont élevés, peut-être l’usage d’un autre lait que celui de leur mère, tout contrarie et retarde en eux les premiers progrès de la nature. L’application qu’on les oblige de donner à mille choses sur lesquelles on fixe continuellement leur attention, tandis qu’on ne donne aucun exercice à leurs forces corporelles, peut encore faire une diversion considérable à leur accroissement; de sorte que, si au lieu de surcharger et fatiguer d’abord leurs esprits de mille manières, on laissait exercer leurs corps aux mouvements continuels que la nature semble leur demander, il est à croire qu’ils seraient beaucoup plus tôt en état de marcher, d’agir et de pourvoir eux-mêmes à leurs besoins.\n\nd. Enfin M. Locke prouve tout au plus qu’il pourrait bien y avoir dans l’homme un motif de demeurer attaché à la femme lorsqu’elle a un enfant; mais il ne prouve nullement qu’il a dû s’y attacher avant l’accouchement et pendant les neuf mois de la grossesse. Si telle femme est indifférente à l’homme pendant ces neuf mois, si même elle lui devient inconnue, pourquoi la secourra-t-il après l’accouchement? pourquoi lui aidera-t-il à élever un enfant qu’il ne sait pas seulement lui appartenir, et dont il n’a résolu ni prévu la naissance? M. Locke suppose évidemment ce qui est en question, car il ne s’agit pas de savoir pourquoi l’homme demeurera attaché à la femme après l’accouchement, mais pourquoi il s’attachera à elle après la conception. L’appétit satisfait, l’homme n’a plus besoin de telle femme, ni la femme de tel homme. Celui-ci n’a pas le moindre souci ni peut-être la moindre idée des suites de son action. L’un s’en va d’un côté, l’autre d’un autre, et il n’y a pas d’apparence qu’au bout de neuf mois ils aient la mémoire de s’être connus, car cette espèce de mémoire par laquelle un individu donne la préférence à un individu pour l’acte de la génération exige, comme je le prouve dans le texte, plus de progrès ou de corruption dans l’entendement humain qu’on ne peut lui en supposer dans l’état d’animalité dont il s’agit ici. Une autre femme peut donc contenter les nouveaux désirs de l’homme aussi commodément que celle qu’il a déjà connue, et un autre homme contenter de même la femme, supposé qu’elle soit pressée du même appétit pendant l’état de grossesse, de quoi l’on peut raisonnablement douter. Que si dans l’état de nature la femme ne ressent plus la passion de l’amour après la conception de l’enfant, l’obstacle à la société avec l’homme en devient encore beaucoup plus grand, puisqu’alors elle n’a plus besoin ni de l’homme qui l’a fécondée ni d’aucun d’autre. Il n’y a donc dans l’homme aucune raison de rechercher la même femme, ni dans la femme aucune raison de rechercher le même homme. Le raisonnement de Locke tombe donc en ruine et toute la dialectique de ce philosophe ne l’a pas garanti de la faute que Hobbes et d’autres ont commise. Ils avaient à expliquer un fait de l’état de nature, c’est-à-dire d’un état où les hommes vivaient isolés, et où tel homme n’avait aucun motif de demeurer à côté de tel homme, ni peut-être les hommes de demeurer à côté les uns des autres, ce qui est bien pis; et ils n’ont pas songé à se transporter au-delà des siècles de société, c’est-à-dire de ces temps où les hommes ont toujours une raison de demeurer près les uns des autres, et où tel homme a souvent raison de demeurer à côté de tel homme ou de telle femme.\n\nNote 13\n\nJe me garderai bien de m’embarquer dans les réflexions philosophiques qu’il y aurait à faire sur les avantages et les inconvénients de cette institution des langues; ce n’est pas à moi qu’on permet d’attaquer les erreurs vulgaires, et le peuple lettré respecte trop ses préjugés pour supporter patiemment mes prétendus paradoxes. Laissons donc parler les gens à qui l’on n’a point fait un crime d’oser prendre quelquefois le parti de la raison contre l’avis de la multitude. Nec quidquam felicitati humani generis decederet, pulsâ tot linguarum peste et confusione, unam artem callerent mortales, et signis, motibus, gestibusque licitum foret quidvis explicare. Nunc vero ita comparatum est, ut animalium quoe vulgó bruta creduntur, melior longè quàm nostra hâc in parte videatur conditio, ut pote quoe promptiùs et forsan feliciùs, sensus et cogitationes suas sine interprete significent, quàm ulli queant mortales, proesertim si peregrino utantur sermone. Is. Vossius, de Poemat. Cant. et Viribus Rythmi, p.66.\n\nNote 14\n\n### Notes, 6\n\nPlaton montrant combien les idées de la quantité discrète et de ses rapports sont nécessaires dans les moindres arts, se moque avec raison des auteurs de son temps qui prétendaient que Palamède avait inventé les nombres au siège de Troie, comme si, dit ce philosophe, Agamemnon eût pu ignorer jusque-là combien il avait de jambes? En effet, on sent l’impossibilité que la société et les arts fussent parvenus où ils étaient déjà du temps du siège de Troie, sans que les hommes eussent l’usage des nombres et du calcul: mais la nécessité de connaître les nombres avant que d’acquérir d’autres connaissances n’en rend pas l’invention plus aisée à imaginer; les noms des nombres une fois connus, il est aisé d’en expliquer le sens et d’exciter les idées que ces noms représentent, mais pour les inventer, il fallut, avant que de concevoir ces mêmes idées, s’être pour ainsi dire familiarisé avec les méditations philosophiques, s’être exercé à considérer les êtres par leur seule essence et indépendamment de toute autre perception, abstraction très pénible, très métaphysique, très peu naturelle et sans laquelle cependant ces idées n’eussent jamais pu se transporter d’une espèce ou d’un genre à un autre, ni les nombres devenir universels. Un sauvage pouvait considérer séparément sa jambe droite et sa jambe gauche, ou les regarder ensemble sous l’idée indivisible d’une couple sans jamais penser qu’il en avait deux; car autre chose est l’idée représentative qui nous peint un objet, et autre chose l’idée numérique qui le détermine. Moins encore pouvait-il calculer jusqu’à cinq, et quoique appliquant ses mains l’une sur l’autre, il eût pu remarquer que les doigts se répondaient exactement, il était bien loin de songer à leur égalité numérique. Il ne savait pas plus le compte de ses doigts que de ses cheveux et si, après lui avoir fait entendre ce que c’est que nombres, quelqu’un lui eût dit qu’il avait autant de doigts aux pieds qu’aux mains, il eût peut-être été fort surpris, en les comparant, de trouver que cela était vrai.\n\nNote 15\n\nIl ne faut pas confondre l’amour-propre et l’amour de soi-même; deux passions très différentes par leur nature et par leurs effets. L’amour de soi-même est un sentiment naturel qui porte tout animal à veiller à sa propre conservation et qui, dirigé dans l’homme par la raison et modifié par la pitié, produit l’humanité et la vertu. L’amour-propre n’est qu’un sentiment relatif, factice et né dans la société, qui porte chaque individu à faire plus cas de soi que de tout autre, qui inspire aux hommes tous les maux qu’ils se font mutuellement et qui est la véritable source de l’honneur.\n\nCeci bien entendu, je dis que dans notre état primitif, dans le véritable état de nature, l’amour-propre n’existe pas. Car, chaque homme en particulier se regardant lui-même comme le seul spectateur qui l’observe, comme le seul être dans l’univers qui prenne intérêt à lui, comme le seul juge de son propre mérite, il n’est pas possible qu’un sentiment qui prend sa source dans des comparaisons qu’il n’est pas à portée de faire, puisse germer dans son âme; par la même raison cet homme ne saurait avoir ni haine ni désir de vengeance, passions qui ne peuvent naître que de l’opinion de quelque offense reçue; et comme c’est le mépris ou l’intention de nuire et non le mal qui constitue l’offense, des hommes qui ne savent ni s’apprécier ni se comparer peuvent se faire beaucoup de violences mutuelles quand il leur en revient quelque avantage, sans jamais s’offenser réciproquement. En un mot, chaque homme ne voyant guère ses semblables que comme il verrait des animaux d’une autre espèce, peut ravir la proie au plus faible ou céder la sienne au plus fort, sans envisager ces rapines que comme des événements naturels, sans le moindre mouvement d’insolence ou de dépit, et sans autre passion que la douleur ou la joie d’un bon ou mauvais succès.\n\nNote 16\n\nC’est une chose extrêmement remarquable que depuis tant d’années que les Européens se tourmentent pour amener les sauvages des diverses contrées du monde à leur manière de vivre, ils n’aient pas pu encore en gagner un seul, non pas même à la faveur du christianisme; car nos missionnaires en font quelquefois des chrétiens, mais jamais des hommes civilisés. Rien ne peut surmonter l’invincible répugnance qu’ils ont à prendre nos mœurs et vivre à notre manière. Si ces pauvres sauvages sont aussi malheureux qu’on le prétend, par quelle inconcevable dépravation de jugement refusent-ils constamment de se policer à notre imitation ou d’apprendre à vivre heureux parmi nous; tandis qu’on lit en mille endroits que des Français et d’autres Européens se sont réfugiés volontairement parmi ces nations, y ont passé leur vie entière, sans pouvoir plus quitter une si étrange manière de vivre, et qu’on voit même des missionnaires sensés regretter avec attendrissement les jours calmes et innocents qu’ils ont passés chez ces peuples si méprisés? Si l’on répond qu’ils n’ont pas assez de lumières pour juger sainement de leur état et du nôtre, je répliquerai que l’estimation du bonheur est moins l’affaire de la raison que du sentiment. D’ailleurs cette réponse peut se rétorquer contre nous avec plus de force encore; car il y a plus loin de nos idées à la disposition d’esprit où il faudrait être pour concevoir le goût que trouvent les sauvages à leur manière de vivre que des idées des sauvages à celles qui peuvent leur faire concevoir la nôtre. En effet, après quelques observations il leur est aisé de voir que tous nos travaux se dirigent sur deux seuls objets, savoir, pour soi les commodités de la vie, et la considération parmi les autres. Mais le moyen pour nous d’imaginer la sorte de plaisir qu’un sauvage prend à passer sa vie seul au milieu des bois ou à la pêche, ou à souffler dans une mauvaise flûte, sans jamais savoir en tirer un seul ton et sans se soucier de l’apprendre?\n\nOn a plusieurs fois amené des sauvages à Paris, à Londres et dans d’autres villes; on s’est empressé de leur étaler notre luxe, nos richesses et tous nos arts les plus utiles et les plus curieux; tout cela n’a jamais excité chez eux qu’une admiration stupide, sans le moindre mouvement de convoitise. Je me souviens entre autres de l’histoire d’un chef de quelques Américains septentrionaux qu’on mena à la cour d’Angleterre il y a une trentaine d’années. On lui fit passer mille choses devant les yeux pour chercher à lui faire quelque présent qui pût lui plaire, sans qu’on trouvât rien dont il parut se soucier. Nos armes lui semblaient lourdes et incommodes, nos souliers lui blessaient les pieds, nos habits le gênaient, il rebutait tout; enfin on s’aperçut qu’ayant pris une couverture de laine, il semblait prendre plaisir à s’en envelopper les épaules; vous conviendrez, au moins, lui dit-on aussitôt, de l’utilité de ce meuble? Oui, répondit-il, cela me paraît presque aussi bon qu’une peau de bête. Encore n’eût-il pas dit cela s’il eût porté l’une et l’autre à la pluie.\n\nPeut-être me dira-t-on que c’est l’habitude qui, attachant chacun à sa manière de vivre, empêche les sauvages de sentir ce qu’il y a de bon dans la nôtre. Et sur ce pied-là il doit paraître au moins fort extraordinaire que l’habitude ait plus de force pour maintenir les sauvages dans le goût de leur misère que les Européens dans la jouissance de leur félicité. Mais pour faire à cette dernière objection une réponse à laquelle il n’y ait pas un mot à répliquer, sans alléguer tous les jeunes sauvages qu’on s’est vainement efforcé de civiliser; sans parler des Groenlandais et des habitants de l’Islande, qu’on a tenté d’élever et nourrir en Danemark, et que la tristesse et le désespoir ont tous fait périr, soit de langueur, soit dans la mer où ils avaient tenté de regagner leur pays à la nage; je me contenterai de citer un seul exemple bien attesté, et que je donne à examiner aux admirateurs de la police européenne.\n\n« Tous les efforts des missionnaires hollandais du cap de Bonne-Espérance n’ont jamais été capables de convertir un seul Hottentot. Van der Stel, gouverneur du Cap, en ayant pris un dès l’enfance, le fit élever dans les principes de la religion chrétienne et dans la pratique des usages de l’Europe. On le vêtit richement, on lui fit apprendre plusieurs langues et ses progrès répondirent fort bien aux soins qu’on prit pour son éducation. Le gouverneur, espérant beaucoup de son esprit, l’envoya aux Indes avec un commissaire général qui l’employa utilement aux affaires de la Compagnie. Il revint au Cap après la mort du commissaire. Peu de jours après son retour, dans une visite qu’il rendit à quelques Hottentots de ses parents, il prit le parti de se dépouiller de sa parure européenne pour se revêtir d’une peau de brebis. Il retourna au fort, dans ce nouvel ajustement, chargé d’un paquet qui contenait ses anciens habits, et les présentant au gouverneur il lui tint ce discours (voy. le frontispice). « Ayez la bonté, monsieur, de faire attention que je renonce pour toujours à cet appareil. Je renonce aussi pour toute ma vie à la religion chrétienne, ma résolution est de vivre et mourir dans la religion, les manières et les usages de mes ancêtres. L’unique grâce que je vous demande est de me laisser le collier et le coutelas que je porte. Je les garderai pour l’amour de vous. » Aussitôt, sans attendre la réponse de Van der Stel, il se déroba par la fuite et jamais on ne le revit au Cap. » Histoire des Voyages, tome 5, p. 175.\n\nNote 17\n\nOn pourrait m’objecter que dans un pareil désordre les hommes au lieu de s’entr’égorger opiniâtrement se seraient dispersés, s’il n’y avait point eu de bornes à leur dispersion. Mais premièrement ces bornes eussent au moins été celles du monde, et si l’on pense à l’excessive population qui résulte de l’état de nature, on jugera que la terre dans cet état n’eût pas tardé à être couverte d’hommes ainsi forcés à se tenir rassemblés. D’ailleurs, ils se seraient dispersés, si le mal avait été rapide et que c’eut été un changement fait du jour au lendemain; mais ils naissaient sous le joug; ils avaient l’habitude de le porter quand ils en sentaient la pesanteur, et ils se contentaient d’attendre l’occasion de le secouer. Enfin, déjà accoutumés à mille commodités qui les forçaient à se tenir rassemblés, la dispersion n’était plus si facile que dans les premiers temps où nul n’ayant besoin que de soi-même, chacun prenait son parti sans attendre le consentement d’un autre.\n\nNote 18\n\nLe maréchal de V*** contait que dans une de ses campagnes, les excessives friponneries d’un entrepreneur des vivres ayant fait souffrir et murmurer l’armée, il le tança vertement et le menaça de le faire pendre. Cette menace ne me regarde pas, lui répondit hardiment le fripon, et je suis bien aise de vous dire qu’on ne pend point un homme qui dispose de cent mille écus. Je ne sais comment cela se fit, ajoutait naïvement le maréchal, mais en effet il ne fut point pendu, quoiqu’il eût cent fois mérité de l’être.\n\nNote 19\n\nLa justice distributive s’opposerait même à cette égalité rigoureuse de l’état de nature, quand elle serait praticable dans la société civile; et comme tous les membres de l’État lui doivent des services proportionnés à leurs talents et à leurs forces, les citoyens à leur tour doivent être distingués et favorisés à proportion de leurs services. C’est en ce sens qu’il faut entendre un passage d’Isocrate dans lequel il loue les premiers Athéniens d’avoir bien su distinguer quelle était la plus avantageuse des deux sortes d’égalité, dont l’une consiste à faire part des mêmes avantages à tous les citoyens indifféremment, et l’autre à les distribuer selon le mérite de chacun. Ces habiles politiques, ajoute l’orateur, bannissant cette injuste égalité qui ne met aucune différence entre les méchants et les gens de bien, s’attachèrent inviolablement à celle qui récompense et punit chacun selon son mérite. Mais premièrement il n’a jamais existé de société, à quelque degré de corruption qu’elles aient pu parvenir, dans laquelle on ne fît aucune différence des méchants et des gens de bien; et dans les matières de mœurs où la loi ne peut fixer de mesure assez exacte pour servir de règle au magistrat, c’est très sagement que, pour ne pas laisser le sort ou le rang des citoyens à sa discrétion, elle lui interdit le jugement des personnes pour ne lui laisser que celui des actions. Il n’y a que des mœurs aussi pures que celles des anciens Romains qui puissent supporter des censeurs, et des pareils tribunaux auraient bientôt tout bouleversé parmi nous: c’est à l’estime publique à mettre de la différence entre les méchants et les gens de bien; le magistrat n’est juge que du droit rigoureux; mais le peuple est le véritable juge des mœurs; juge intègre et même éclairé sur ce point, qu’on abuse quelquefois, mais qu’on ne corrompt jamais. Les rangs des citoyens doivent donc être réglés, non sur leur mérite personnel, ce qui serait laisser au magistrat le moyen de faire une application presque arbitraire de la loi, mais sur les services réels qu’ils rendent à l’État et qui sont susceptibles d’une estimation plus exacte.","download_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/discours/original.txt"},"translations":[{"id":"trn_discours_mouseia","translator":"Mouseia","kind":"curated","note":"Mouseia’s complete machine-assisted Musean translation, made directly from the complete French text (dedicatory epistle, preface, both parts and the notes) for fidelity, the author’s force and cadence, and modern clarity.","text":"### Epistle Dedicatory: To the Republic of Geneva, 1\n\nTo the Republic\n\nof Geneva.\n\nMagnificent, most honored, and sovereign lords,\n\nConvinced that only a virtuous citizen may pay his country honors she can acknowledge, I have labored for thirty years to earn the right to offer you a public tribute; and since this happy occasion makes up in part for what my efforts have failed to accomplish, I have thought I might consult the zeal that animates me more than the right that ought to authorize me. Having had the good fortune to be born among you, how could I reflect on the equality nature has established among men, and the inequality they have instituted, without thinking of the profound wisdom by which both, happily combined in this state, contribute, in a manner most closely approaching natural law and most favorable to society, to the maintenance of public order and the happiness of individuals? Seeking the best maxims that common sense can dictate for the constitution of a government, I was so struck to see them all put into practice in yours that, even had I not been born within your walls, I should have thought myself bound to offer this portrait of human society to that people which seems to me to possess its greatest advantages and to have best forestalled its abuses.\n\nHad I been able to choose my birthplace, I would have chosen a society whose size was bounded by the reach of human faculties—that is, by the possibility of being well governed—and where each person, equal to his task, would not be forced to entrust to others the duties for which he was responsible; a state where all individuals knew one another, where neither the obscure maneuvers of vice nor the modesty of virtue could escape public sight and judgment, and where the sweet habit of seeing and knowing one another would make love of country a love of its citizens rather than of its soil.\n\nI would have wished to be born in a country where sovereign and people could have only one and the same interest, so that every movement of the machine would tend solely toward their common happiness. Since that can happen only if the people and sovereign are one and the same person, it follows that I would have wished to be born under a wisely tempered democratic government.\n\nI would have wished to live and die free: so thoroughly subject to the laws that neither I nor anyone else could shake off their honorable yoke, that salutary and gentle yoke which the proudest spirits bear all the more willingly because they are made to bear no other.\n\nI would therefore have wished that no one within the state could claim to stand above the law, and that no one outside it could impose a law the state was obliged to recognize. For whatever a government's constitution may be, if a single man in it is not subject to the law, all the rest are necessarily at his mercy; and if there is one national head and another foreign head, however they divide authority, it is impossible for both to be properly obeyed or for the state to be well governed.\n\nI would not have wished to live in a newly founded republic, however good its laws, for fear that its government, perhaps constituted otherwise than circumstances required, would not suit its new citizens, or its citizens their new government, leaving the state liable to be shaken and destroyed almost at birth. Liberty is like rich, substantial food or generous wine: it nourishes and strengthens robust constitutions accustomed to it, but overwhelms, ruins, and intoxicates the weak and delicate who are not used to it. Once peoples are accustomed to masters, they can no longer do without them. If they try to cast off the yoke, they move all the farther from liberty because, mistaking for it the unbridled license that is its opposite, their revolutions almost always deliver them to deceivers who only make their chains heavier. Even the Roman people, that model for all free peoples, could not govern itself on emerging from the oppression of the Tarquins. Degraded by slavery and the humiliating labors they had imposed, it was at first only a dull mob, which had to be handled and governed with the greatest wisdom so that, gradually accustomed to breathe the wholesome air of liberty, these souls enfeebled—or rather brutalized—under tyranny might acquire by degrees that severity of manners and pride of courage which at last made them the most admirable of all peoples. I would therefore have sought as my homeland a happy and peaceful republic whose antiquity was almost lost in the night of time, which had suffered only those blows that brought forth and strengthened its inhabitants' courage and love of country, and whose citizens, long accustomed to a wise independence, were not merely free but worthy of freedom.\n\nI would have chosen a homeland turned aside by a fortunate lack of power from the savage love of conquest, and protected by a still more fortunate position from the fear of becoming another state's conquest: a free city set among several peoples, none of whom had an interest in invading it and each of whom had an interest in preventing the others from doing so; a republic, in short, that did not tempt its neighbors' ambition and could reasonably count on their aid in time of need. It follows that in so happy a position it would have nothing to fear but itself; and that if its citizens practiced arms, they would do so less from the need to defend themselves than to preserve that martial ardor and pride of courage which so well befit liberty and nourish a taste for it.\n\nI would have sought a country where the right to legislate belonged to all citizens; for who can know better than they the conditions under which it suits them to live together in one society? But I would not have approved plebiscites like those of the Romans, from whose deliberations the heads of state, most concerned for its preservation, were excluded even when its safety often depended on them; and where, by an absurd inconsistency, magistrates were denied rights enjoyed by ordinary citizens.\n\nOn the contrary, to check self-interested, ill-conceived proposals and the dangerous innovations that finally ruined the Athenians, I would have wished that no one had power to propose new laws at whim; that this right belonged to magistrates alone; that even they exercised it with such circumspection, the people for their part were so guarded in giving their consent, and promulgation could take place only with such solemnity, that before the constitution could be shaken there would be time to become convinced that it is above all the great antiquity of laws that makes them sacred and venerable; that people soon despise laws they see changed every day, and that in growing accustomed to neglect old usages on the pretext of doing better, one often introduces great evils to correct lesser ones.\n\nAbove all I would have fled, as necessarily ill governed, a republic in which the people, believing they could do without their magistrates, or leave them only a precarious authority, had imprudently retained the administration of civil affairs and the execution of their own laws. Such must have been the crude constitution of the earliest governments emerging directly from the state of nature; and such was another of the faults that ruined the republic of Athens.\n\nI would instead have chosen one where individuals, content to sanction the laws and to decide collectively, upon their leaders' report, the most important public affairs, established respected courts, carefully distinguished their various departments, and elected year by year the ablest and most upright of their fellow citizens to administer justice and govern the state. There, the virtue of the magistrates bearing witness to the wisdom of the people, each would honor the other; so that if disastrous misunderstandings ever disturbed public harmony, even those times of blindness and error would be marked by signs of moderation, mutual esteem, and common respect for the laws—omens and pledges of a sincere and lasting reconciliation.\n\nSuch, magnificent, most honored, and sovereign lords, are the advantages I would have sought in the homeland I might have chosen. And if Providence had added to these a delightful situation, a temperate climate, fertile land, and the most enchanting prospect beneath the sky, I would have desired nothing more to complete my happiness than to enjoy all these blessings in the bosom of that happy homeland: living peacefully in gentle fellowship with my fellow citizens, practicing toward them and after their example humanity, friendship, and every virtue, and leaving behind the honorable memory of a good man and an honest, virtuous patriot.\n\nIf, less fortunate or wise too late, I had found myself condemned to end a frail and languishing life in other climes, vainly regretting the repose and peace of which an imprudent youth had deprived me, I would at least have cherished in my soul those same sentiments I could no longer put to use in my own country. Filled with tender and disinterested affection for my distant fellow citizens, I would have addressed to them from the depths of my heart something like these words:\n\nMy dear fellow citizens—or rather my brothers, since ties of blood as well as laws unite nearly all of us—it is sweet to me that I cannot think of you without thinking at the same time of all the blessings you enjoy, whose value perhaps none of you feels more keenly than I, who have lost them. The more I reflect upon your political and civil condition, the less I can imagine that the nature of human affairs permits a better one. In every other government, when the question is how to secure the greatest good for the state, everything remains forever a matter of imagined schemes, or at most mere possibilities. For you, happiness is already made: you have only to enjoy it; and to become perfectly happy you need only know how to be content with it. Your sovereignty, won or recovered by the sword and preserved for two centuries through courage and wisdom, is at last fully and universally recognized. Honorable treaties fix your boundaries, secure your rights, and strengthen your peace. Your constitution is excellent, dictated by the most sublime reason and guaranteed by friendly and respected powers; your state is tranquil; you have neither wars nor conquerors to fear; you have no masters but wise laws of your own making, administered by upright magistrates of your own choosing. You are neither rich enough to be enervated by softness and to lose, amid empty pleasures, your taste for true happiness and enduring virtues, nor poor enough to need more help from abroad than your industry supplies; and the precious liberty that great nations maintain only through exorbitant taxes costs you almost nothing to preserve.\n\n### Epistle Dedicatory: To the Republic of Geneva, 2\n\nMay a republic so wisely and happily constituted endure forever, for the happiness of its citizens and the example of all peoples! That is the only wish left for you to make, the only care left for you to take. It is now for you alone not to create your happiness—your ancestors have spared you that labor—but to make it last through the wisdom of using it well. Your preservation depends on your perpetual unity, your obedience to the laws, and your respect for their ministers. If the least seed of bitterness or mistrust remains among you, hasten to destroy it as a deadly leaven from which your misfortunes and the ruin of the state would sooner or later arise. I entreat you all to look into the depths of your hearts and consult the secret voice of your conscience. Does anyone among you know of a body anywhere in the world more upright, more enlightened, more worthy of respect than your magistracy? Do not all its members set you an example of moderation, simple manners, respect for the laws, and the most sincere reconciliation? Give back without reserve, then, to such wise leaders the wholesome trust that reason owes to virtue. Remember that they are of your choosing, that they justify that choice, and that honors paid to those whom you have raised to dignity necessarily reflect upon yourselves. None of you is so unenlightened as not to know that where the vigor of the laws and the authority of their defenders cease, there can be neither safety nor freedom for anyone. What is at stake among you, then, except doing willingly and with rightful confidence what your true interest, duty, and reason would in any case oblige you to do? Never let a culpable and ruinous indifference to preserving the constitution make you neglect, when necessary, the wise counsel of those among you most enlightened and most devoted. But let equity, moderation, and the firmest respect continue to govern all your actions, and show the whole world in you the example of a people proud and modest, as jealous of its glory as of its liberty. Above all, beware—and this is my last counsel—of ever heeding sinister interpretations and venomous talk, whose hidden motives are often more dangerous than the actions they target. A whole household wakes and stands alarmed at the first cries of a good and faithful watchdog that barks only at the approach of thieves; but people hate the nuisance of noisy animals that endlessly disturb the public peace, whose incessant, misplaced warnings go unheeded even when a warning is needed.\n\nAnd you, magnificent and most honored lords, worthy and respected magistrates of a free people: allow me to offer you in particular my homage and devotion. If there is a rank in the world that ennobles those who hold it, surely it is the rank conferred by talent and virtue, the rank you have made yourselves worthy of and to which your fellow citizens have raised you. Their own merit lends new luster to yours; and chosen to govern by men themselves capable of governing others, you stand, in my eyes, as far above other magistrates as a free people—above all the people you have the honor to lead—stands in enlightenment and reason above the masses of other states.\n\nAllow me to cite an example of which better traces ought to remain, and which will always be present to my heart. I cannot recall without the sweetest emotion the virtuous citizen to whom I owe my life, who often spoke to me in childhood of the respect you were owed. I still see him earning his living with his hands and nourishing his soul with the most sublime truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius mingled before him with the tools of his trade. I see at his side a beloved son receiving, with too little benefit, the tender instruction of the best of fathers. Yet though the wanderings of a foolish youth made me forget such wise lessons for a time, I am fortunate to learn at last that, however much one may incline toward vice, an education in which the heart has taken part is not easily lost forever.\n\nSuch, magnificent and most honored lords, are the citizens, and even the ordinary inhabitants, born in the state you govern; such are those instructed and sensible men of whom other nations, under the names of workmen and common people, entertain such low and false ideas. My father, I gladly confess, was not distinguished among his fellow citizens: he was only what they all are; yet such as he was, there is no country where the best people would not have sought and cultivated his company, and profited by it. It is not for me—and thanks to heaven, there is no need—to tell you what consideration men of this stamp may expect from you, your equals in education as well as by the rights of nature and birth, your inferiors by their own will, by the preference they owed to your merit and have given it, for which you in turn owe them a kind of gratitude. I learn with keen satisfaction how much gentleness and consideration you bring to your dealings with them to temper the gravity proper to ministers of the law; how much esteem and attention you return for the obedience and respect they owe you. Such conduct, full of justice and wisdom, is fitted to banish ever farther the memory of unhappy events that must be forgotten if they are never to be seen again; and it is all the more judicious because this fair-minded and generous people takes pleasure in its duty, naturally loves to honor you, and those most ardent in defending their rights are most disposed to respect yours.\n\nIt is no wonder that the leaders of a civil society love its glory and happiness; it is far too rare, for the peace of humankind, that those who regard themselves as magistrates—or rather as masters—of a holier and more sublime homeland show any love for the earthly homeland that sustains them. How sweet it is for me to make so rare an exception on our behalf, and to count among our best citizens these zealous guardians of sacred doctrines sanctioned by the laws, these venerable shepherds of souls whose ardent and gentle eloquence carries the maxims of the Gospel into hearts all the more effectively because they always begin by practicing them themselves! Everyone knows how successfully the great art of preaching is cultivated in Geneva. Yet, too accustomed to seeing people say one thing and do another, few know how thoroughly the spirit of Christianity, holiness of conduct, rigor toward oneself, and gentleness toward others prevail among our ministers. Perhaps Geneva alone can present the edifying example of so perfect a union between a society of theologians and men of letters. It is largely upon their acknowledged wisdom and moderation, and upon their zeal for the prosperity of the state, that I found my hope for its eternal tranquility; and I note, with pleasure mingled with wonder and respect, how they abhor the dreadful maxims of those holy and barbarous men of whom history offers more than one example, who, in defending the supposed rights of God—that is, their own interests—were all the freer with human blood because they flattered themselves that their own would always be respected.\n\nCould I forget that precious half of the republic which makes the other half happy, and whose gentleness and wisdom preserve its peace and good morals? Amiable and virtuous women citizens, the destiny of your sex will always be to govern ours. Happy are we when your chaste power, exercised only within marriage, makes itself felt solely for the glory of the state and the public happiness! Thus women held sway in Sparta, and thus you deserve to hold sway in Geneva. What barbarous man could resist the voice of honor and reason on the lips of a tender wife? And who would not scorn empty luxury at the sight of your simple, modest dress, which, borrowing its radiance from you, seems the most becoming adornment of beauty? It is for you, by your gracious and innocent influence and your tactful intelligence, always to maintain love of the laws within the state and concord among its citizens; to reunite divided families through happy marriages; and above all, by the persuasive gentleness of your instruction and the modest grace of your conversation, to correct the affectations our young men pick up in other countries. Instead of the many useful things they might have learned there, they bring back from women of dissolute life a childish tone, ridiculous airs, and admiration for certain pretended forms of grandeur—frivolous compensations for servitude that will never equal august liberty. Remain, then, what you are: chaste guardians of morals and gentle bonds of peace; and continue, on every occasion, to uphold the rights of the heart and of nature in the service of duty and virtue.\n\nI trust that events will not prove me wrong in grounding my hope for the citizens' common happiness and the republic's glory on such pledges. I admit that with all these advantages it will not glitter with that brilliance which dazzles most eyes and whose childish and ruinous allure is the deadliest enemy of happiness and liberty. Let dissolute youth seek easy pleasures and long regrets elsewhere; let those who profess good taste admire elsewhere the grandeur of palaces, the beauty of carriages, sumptuous furnishings, the splendor of entertainments, and every refinement of softness and luxury. In Geneva one will find only men; yet that sight, too, has its worth, and those who seek it will be worth as much as the admirers of all the rest.\n\nDeign, magnificent, most honored, and sovereign lords, to receive with equal kindness these respectful tokens of the interest I take in your common prosperity. If I have been unfortunate enough to give way to some indiscreet impulse in this ardent outpouring of my heart, I beg you to forgive it for the tender affection of a true patriot and the ardent, rightful zeal of a man who can imagine no greater happiness for himself than to see you all happy.\n\nI remain with the deepest respect,\n\nmagnificent, most honored, and sovereign lords,\n\nYour most humble and most obedient servant and fellow citizen,\n\nJ. J. ROUSSEAU.\n\nAt Chambéry, June 12, 1754.\n\n### Preface\n\nPREFACE.\n\nOf all human knowledge, knowledge of man seems to me the most useful and the least advanced; and I dare say that the inscription on the temple at Delphi alone contained a precept more important and more difficult than all the weighty volumes of the moralists. I therefore regard the subject of this discourse as one of the most absorbing questions philosophy can raise, and, unfortunately for us, one of the most thorny philosophers can resolve. For how are we to know the source of inequality among men if we do not begin by knowing men themselves? And how will man manage to see himself as nature formed him, through all the changes that the passage of time and events must have worked upon his original constitution, and to distinguish what belongs to him inherently from what circumstances and his own progress have added to or changed in his first condition? Like the statue of Glaucus, so disfigured by time, the sea, and storms that it resembled a savage beast rather than a god, the human soul, altered in the midst of society by a thousand ever-renewed causes, by the acquisition of a multitude of facts and errors, by changes in the constitution of bodies, and by the continual collision of passions, has so changed its appearance, as it were, that it is almost unrecognizable. In place of a being always acting by fixed and unchanging principles, in place of that heavenly and majestic simplicity its maker impressed upon it, we find only the misshapen contrast of passion imagining itself rational and understanding gone mad.\n\nCrueler still, since every advance of the human species constantly carries it farther from its original condition, the more new knowledge we accumulate, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all; in one sense it is by studying man so intently that we have made ourselves incapable of knowing him.\n\nIt is easy to see that in these successive changes in the human constitution we must seek the first origin of the differences that distinguish men, who, by common consent, are naturally as equal among themselves as the animals of each species were before various physical causes introduced into some species the varieties we observe. Indeed, it is inconceivable that these first changes, however they came about, altered all the individuals of the species at once and in the same way. Some grew better or worse, acquiring various good or bad qualities not inherent in their nature, while others remained longer in their original condition. This was the first source of inequality among men, easier to demonstrate in general terms than to identify precisely in its actual causes.\n\nLet my readers not imagine, then, that I flatter myself I have seen what seems to me so difficult to see. I have begun a few lines of reasoning and ventured a few conjectures, less in the hope of resolving the question than in the intention of clarifying it and setting it in its true light. Others may readily go farther along the same path, though it will not be easy for anyone to reach the end. For it is no small undertaking to disentangle what is original from what is artificial in man's present nature, and to know accurately a condition that no longer exists, perhaps never existed, and probably never will exist, yet of which we must have a sound conception if we are to judge our present condition well. Even to determine what precautions would be needed to make reliable observations on this subject would require more philosophy than one might suppose; and a good solution to the following problem would not, I think, be unworthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our century: “What experiments would be needed to come to know natural man, and what means are there of carrying out these experiments within society?” Far from undertaking to solve this problem, I believe I have reflected on it enough to venture an answer in advance: even the greatest philosophers will not be too accomplished to direct these experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns too powerful to carry them out. Such cooperation can hardly reasonably be expected, especially with the perseverance—or rather the succession of insight and good will—required on both sides for success.\n\nThese inquiries, so difficult to carry out and so little considered until now, are nevertheless the only means left to us of resolving a host of difficulties that hide from us the real foundations of human society. It is this ignorance of man's nature that throws so much uncertainty and obscurity over the true definition of natural right: for the idea of right, says M. Burlamaqui, and still more that of natural right, are manifestly ideas relative to the nature of man. It is from this very nature of man, he continues, from his constitution and his condition, that the principles of this science must be drawn.\n\nIt is with both surprise and indignation that one observes how little agreement prevails on this important matter among the various authors who have treated it. Among the most serious writers one can scarcely find two of the same opinion on the point. To say nothing of the ancient philosophers, who seem to have made it their task to contradict one another on the most fundamental principles, Roman jurists subject man and every other animal indiscriminately to the same natural law, because by that name they mean the law nature imposes on itself rather than one it prescribes—or, rather, because of the particular sense in which these jurists understand the word law, which on this occasion they seem to take only as the expression of general relations established by nature among all living beings for their common preservation. Modern thinkers, recognizing as law only a rule prescribed to a moral being—that is, an intelligent, free being considered in relation to other beings—accordingly confine the jurisdiction of natural law to the rational animal alone, that is, man. Yet each defining this law in his own way, they all establish it upon such metaphysical principles that even among us very few people are capable of understanding them, much less discovering them for themselves. Thus all the definitions of these learned men, otherwise in perpetual contradiction, agree only in this: one cannot understand the law of nature, and therefore cannot obey it, without being a consummate reasoner and a profound metaphysician. This means precisely that, to establish society, men must have employed insights that develop only with great difficulty, and in very few people, within society itself.\n\nKnowing so little of nature and agreeing so poorly on the meaning of the word law, we would find it very hard to settle upon a good definition of natural law. Accordingly, all those found in books, besides failing to agree with one another, suffer from being derived from kinds of knowledge men do not naturally possess and from advantages they can conceive only after leaving the state of nature. Writers begin by seeking rules upon which it would serve the common good for men to agree; then they call the collection of these rules natural law, offering no proof beyond the good they discover would follow from their universal practice. This is certainly a very convenient way of composing definitions and explaining the nature of things by nearly arbitrary arrangements.\n\nBut so long as we do not know natural man, we will strive in vain to determine the law he has received, or the law that best suits his constitution. All we can see quite clearly about this law is that, for it to be law, the will of the person it binds must be able to submit to it knowingly; and, for it to be natural, it must speak directly through the voice of nature.\n\nLeaving aside, then, all the scientific books that teach us only to see men as they have made themselves, and reflecting upon the first and simplest operations of the human soul, I think I discern there two principles prior to reason. One makes us keenly concerned for our well-being and self-preservation; the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being perish or suffer, especially our fellow humans. From the cooperation and combination that our mind can make of these two principles, without any need to introduce sociability, all the rules of natural right seem to me to flow—rules that reason is subsequently forced to reestablish upon other foundations when, through its successive developments, it has managed to stifle nature.\n\nIn this way we need not make man a philosopher before making him a man; his duties toward others are not dictated to him solely by the belated lessons of wisdom. So long as he does not resist the inward impulse of compassion, he will never harm another man, or indeed any sentient being, except in the legitimate case where his preservation is at stake and he is compelled to give himself preference. This also puts an end to the old disputes over whether animals share in natural law. It is clear that, lacking understanding and freedom, they cannot recognize that law; but since they share something of our nature through the capacity to feel, we must judge that they, too, ought to share in natural right, and that man is bound by some kind of duty toward them. Indeed, it seems that if I am obliged not to harm my fellow human, that is less because he is a rational being than because he is a sentient being: a quality common to beast and man that ought at least to give the former the right not to be needlessly mistreated by the latter.\n\nThis same study of original man, his true needs, and the fundamental principles of his duties is again the only sound means we can use to resolve the many difficulties arising over the origin of moral inequality, the real foundations of the political body, the reciprocal rights of its members, and a thousand similar questions, as important as they are poorly understood.\n\nSeen with a calm and disinterested eye, human society at first seems to display nothing but the violence of the powerful and the oppression of the weak. The mind rebels at the harshness of the former or is moved to lament the blindness of the latter. And because nothing among men is less stable than those outward relations, produced more often by chance than by wisdom, which we call weakness and power, wealth and poverty, human institutions appear at first glance founded on heaps of shifting sand. Only when we examine them closely, only after brushing aside the dust and sand that surround the building, do we perceive the unshakable base upon which it stands and learn to respect its foundations. Without a serious study of man, of his natural faculties and their successive development, we will never succeed in making these distinctions and separating, in the present constitution of things, what the divine will has done from what human art has presumed to do. The political and moral inquiries occasioned by the important question I examine are therefore useful in every way, and the hypothetical history of governments offers man an instructive lesson in every respect. By considering what we would have become if left to ourselves, we must learn to bless the one whose beneficent hand, correcting our institutions and giving them an unshakable foundation, has forestalled the disorders that should have followed from them and brought forth our happiness from the very means that seemed destined to complete our misery.\n\nLearn what sort of being God\n\nHas commanded you to be, and what place in human affairs\n\nYou occupy.\n\nPers. sat. III, v. 71.\n\n### Part One, 1\n\nDISCOURSE\n\nON\n\nTHE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS\n\nOF INEQUALITY\n\nAMONG MEN.\n\nIt is of man that I must speak; and the question I examine tells me that I shall be speaking to men, for no one puts forward such questions when afraid to honor the truth. I will therefore confidently defend the cause of humanity before the wise men who invite me to do so, and I shall not be displeased with myself if I prove worthy of my subject and my judges.\n\nI conceive of two kinds of inequality in the human species: one I call natural or physical, because nature establishes it, and it consists in differences of age, health, bodily strength, and qualities of mind or soul; the other may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of men. The latter consists in the various privileges some enjoy to the detriment of others, such as being richer, more honored, more powerful than they are, or even making themselves obeyed by them.\n\nOne cannot ask what is the source of natural inequality, because the answer is already stated in the simple definition of the word. Still less can one investigate whether there is some essential connection between the two inequalities; for that would be to ask, in other words, whether those who command are necessarily worthier than those who obey, and whether bodily or mental strength, wisdom or virtue, are always found in the same individuals in proportion to their power or wealth: a question perhaps fit to be debated among slaves within hearing of their masters, but not among reasonable and free men in search of truth.\n\nWhat, then, precisely is the purpose of this Discourse? To mark, in the course of events, the moment when right succeeded violence and nature was subjected to law; to explain by what chain of wonders the strong could resolve to serve the weak, and the people to buy an imagined repose at the price of real happiness.\n\nThe philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the need to go back to the state of nature, but none has reached it. Some have not hesitated to assume that man in that condition possessed the notion of just and unjust, without troubling to show that he must have had that notion, or even that it would have been useful to him. Others have spoken of the natural right of each to preserve what belongs to him, without explaining what they meant by belonging. Others, granting the strongest authority over the weakest from the outset, immediately brought government into being, without considering the time that must have passed before the meanings of the words authority and government could exist among men. Finally, all of them, speaking incessantly of need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride, have transferred to the state of nature ideas they drew from society: they spoke of savage man, and they painted civil man. It did not even occur to most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of nature had existed, whereas a reading of the sacred books makes it evident that the first man, having received knowledge and commandments directly from God, was not himself in that condition. If we give the writings of Moses the faith that every Christian philosopher owes them, we must deny that men were ever in a pure state of nature, even before the flood, unless some extraordinary event cast them back into it—a paradox most difficult to defend and altogether impossible to prove.\n\nLet us begin, then, by setting aside all the facts, for they do not bear on the question. The inquiries that may be made into this subject must not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better suited to illuminating the nature of things than to showing their actual origin, like the reasonings our physicists make every day about the formation of the world. Religion commands us to believe that, since God himself took men out of the state of nature immediately after creation, they are unequal because he willed them to be so. But religion does not forbid us to form conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of man and the beings around him, about what the human race might have become if left to itself. That is what I am asked to do, and what I propose to examine in this Discourse. Since my subject concerns man in general, I shall try to speak in a language suited to every nation; or rather, forgetting times and places in order to think only of the men to whom I speak, I shall imagine myself in the Lyceum at Athens, repeating the lessons of my teachers, with men like Plato and Xenocrates as my judges and the human race as my audience.\n\nO man, whatever country you come from, whatever opinions you hold, listen: here is your history as I believe I have read it, not in the books of your fellow men, who lie, but in nature, who never lies. Whatever comes from her will be true; only what I have unwittingly mingled with it from myself will be false. The times of which I shall speak are very distant: how greatly you have changed from what you were! It is, so to speak, the life of your species that I shall describe, from the qualities you received, which your education and habits may have corrupted but could not destroy. There is, I know, an age at which the individual man would wish to stop: you will seek the age at which you wish your species had stopped. Discontented with your present condition for reasons that foretell still greater discontent to your unhappy descendants, perhaps you would wish to turn back; and that feeling ought to praise your earliest forebears, condemn your contemporaries, and fill with dread those unfortunate enough to live after you.\n\nPART ONE.\n\nHowever important it is, in order to judge man's natural condition properly, to consider him from his origin and examine him, as it were, in the first embryo of the species, I will not follow his organization through its successive developments. I will not pause to inquire what he may have been in the animal system at first before becoming what he is at last. I will not examine whether, as Aristotle thinks, his long nails were once hooked claws; whether he was hairy like a bear; or whether, walking on all fours (Note 3), his eyes directed toward the ground and limited to a horizon only a few paces away, marked both the character and the limits of his ideas. On this subject I could form only vague and almost imaginary conjectures. Comparative anatomy has made too little progress, and the observations of naturalists are still too uncertain, to establish the basis of sound reasoning on such foundations. Thus, without recourse to the supernatural knowledge we possess on this point, and without considering the changes that must have occurred in man's form, both inward and outward, as he put his limbs to new uses and fed on new foods, I shall suppose him always formed as I see him today: walking on two feet, using his hands as we use ours, sweeping all nature with his gaze and measuring with his eyes the vast extent of the heavens. Strip this being, thus constituted, of all the supernatural gifts he may have received and all the artificial faculties he could have acquired only by long development; consider him, in short, as he must have emerged from nature's hands, and I see an animal less strong than some, less agile than others, but, all things considered, the most advantageously formed of all. I see him satisfying his hunger beneath an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed at the foot of the same tree that supplied his meal; and with that his needs are met.\n\nThe earth, left to its natural fertility (Note 4) and covered with immense forests never mutilated by the ax, offers at every step stores of food and places of refuge to animals of every kind. Men, scattered among them, observe and imitate their ingenuity, and thus rise to the level of animal instinct; with this advantage: each species has only its own instinct, while man, perhaps possessing none peculiar to himself, appropriates them all, feeds alike on most of the various foods (Note 5) that the other animals divide among themselves, and consequently finds his subsistence more easily than any of them can.\n\nAccustomed from childhood to the inclemency of the weather and the harshness of the seasons, trained to endure fatigue, and compelled, naked and unarmed, to defend their lives and their prey against other wild beasts or outrun them, men develop a robust and almost unchangeable constitution. Children, bringing into the world the excellent constitution of their fathers and strengthening it through the same exercises that produced it, thus acquire all the vigor of which the human species is capable. Nature treats them exactly as the law of Sparta treated the citizens' children: she makes those who are well formed strong and robust, and lets all the others perish. In this she differs from our societies, where the state, by making children a burden to their fathers, kills them indiscriminately before they are born.\n\nSince the savage man's body is the only tool he knows, he puts it to a variety of uses of which our own bodies, for lack of practice, are incapable; it is our ingenuity that robs us of the strength and agility necessity compels him to acquire. If he had an ax, would his wrist break such sturdy branches? If he had a sling, would he hurl a stone so forcefully by hand? If he had a ladder, would he climb a tree so nimbly? If he had a horse, would he run so fast? Give civil man time to gather all his machines around him, and there is no doubt he will easily overcome savage man. But if you wish to see a contest more unequal still, set them naked and unarmed face to face, and you will soon recognize the advantage of having all one's powers constantly at hand, of being always ready for any event, and of carrying, so to speak, one's entire self wherever one goes (Note 6).\n\nHobbes maintains that man is naturally fearless and seeks only to attack and fight. An illustrious philosopher thinks the opposite, and Cumberland and Puffendorf affirm it too: that nothing is so timid as man in the state of nature, that he is forever trembling and ready to flee at the faintest sound he hears, the slightest movement he sees. This may be true of things he does not know; and I do not doubt that every unfamiliar sight alarms him whenever he cannot distinguish what physical good or evil to expect from it, or compare his strength with the dangers he must face. Such circumstances are rare in the state of nature, where everything proceeds so uniformly and the face of the earth is not subject to the sudden, continual changes produced in it by the passions and inconstancy of assembled peoples. But savage man, living scattered among the animals and finding himself early on in situations where he must measure himself against them, soon makes the comparison; and, perceiving that he surpasses them in skill more than they surpass him in strength, he learns to fear them no longer. Set a bear or wolf against a sturdy, agile, courageous savage—as all savages are—armed with stones and a stout stick, and you will see that the peril is at least mutual. After several such encounters, wild beasts, which do not like to attack one another, will be little inclined to attack a man they have found every bit as fierce as themselves. As for animals whose strength really exceeds his skill, he stands in relation to them as do other, weaker species, which nonetheless survive; with this advantage for man: no less fleet of foot than they, and finding nearly certain refuge in trees, he can everywhere choose whether to engage or withdraw in an encounter, whether to flee or fight. Let us add that no animal seems naturally to make war on man except in self-defense or extreme hunger, or to show toward him those violent antipathies which seem to indicate that nature has destined one species to be another's food.\n\nThese are doubtless the reasons why Black people and savages concern themselves so little with the wild beasts they may meet in the woods. The Caribs of Venezuela, among others, live in the most complete security in this respect, without the least inconvenience. Though they go almost naked, says François Corréal, they venture boldly into the woods armed only with bow and arrow; yet no one has ever heard that any of them was devoured by beasts.\n\n### Part One, 2\n\nOther enemies, more formidable and less easily resisted by man, are natural infirmities, childhood, old age, and diseases of every kind: sad signs of our weakness, the first two shared by all animals, the last belonging chiefly to man living in society. On the subject of childhood, I observe that a mother who carries her child wherever she goes can feed it far more easily than the females of many animals, which must continually travel back and forth, at great cost to themselves, between seeking their own food and suckling or feeding their young. It is true that if the woman dies, her child runs a grave risk of dying with her; but this danger is common to a hundred other species whose young cannot for a long time seek food for themselves. And though childhood lasts longer among us, life is longer too, so that the balance here remains much the same (Note 7); there are, however, other rules concerning the duration of early life and the number of offspring (Note 8), which lie outside my subject. Among the old, who exert themselves and perspire little, the need for food diminishes along with the ability to procure it. And since life in the wild spares them gout and rheumatism, while old age is the affliction that human aid can do least to relieve, they finally die without anyone noticing that they have ceased to live, and almost without noticing it themselves. As for diseases, I will not repeat the vain and false tirades that most healthy people deliver against medicine; but I ask whether any sound observation allows us to conclude that average human life is shorter in countries where medicine is most neglected than in those where it is practiced with the greatest care. And how could it be otherwise, when we inflict upon ourselves more ailments than medicine can supply remedies? The extreme inequality of ways of life; excessive idleness in some and excessive labor in others; the ease with which we excite and gratify our appetites and sensuality; the rich man's overrefined food, feeding him with heating juices and crushing him with indigestion; the poor man's bad food, which he most often lacks altogether, so that deprivation drives him to gorge himself greedily whenever he can; sleepless nights, excesses of every kind, the ungoverned transports of every passion, mental strain and exhaustion, the numberless griefs and troubles experienced in every station, which continually gnaw at the soul: these are the fatal witnesses that most of our ills are our own work, and that we would have escaped almost all of them had we preserved the simple, even, solitary way of life prescribed to us by nature. If nature destined us for health, I almost dare assert that the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature, and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal. When we consider the robust constitution of savage peoples—at least those whom we have not ruined with our strong liquors—and know that they are scarcely acquainted with any diseases but wounds and old age, we are strongly inclined to believe that the history of human diseases could easily be written by following the history of civil societies. Such, at least, is Plato's opinion: from certain remedies used or approved by Podalirius and Machaon at the siege of Troy, he judges that various diseases which these remedies would have provoked were then still unknown among men. And Celsus reports that the regimen so necessary today was invented only by Hippocrates.\n\nWith so few sources of suffering, man in the state of nature has little need of remedies, still less of physicians. In this respect, too, the human species is no worse off than any other, and hunters can readily tell us whether they meet many infirm animals in their travels. Many encounter animals with considerable wounds that have healed very well, with bones and even limbs once broken and knit again, having had no surgeon but time and no regimen but their ordinary lives. They have recovered no less completely for not having been tormented by incisions, poisoned with drugs, or wasted by fasts. Finally, however useful well-administered medicine may be among us, it remains certain that while the sick savage left to himself can hope for nothing but nature's help, he has, in return, nothing to fear but his illness; this often makes his condition preferable to ours. Let us therefore beware of confusing savage man with the men before our eyes. Nature treats every animal left in her care with a special favor that seems to show how jealously she guards this right. The horse, the cat, the bull, even the donkey, are for the most part taller in the forests than in our homes, and all have sturdier constitutions, greater vigor, strength, and courage. In becoming domestic they lose half these advantages, as though all our care to feed and treat them well served only to debase them. So it is with man himself: becoming sociable and enslaved, he grows weak, fearful, and servile; his soft and effeminate way of life finishes by sapping strength and courage alike. We should add that the difference between man and man in the wild and domestic conditions must be greater still than the difference between beast and beast. For since nature treated animal and man alike, every comfort man gives himself beyond those he gives the animals he tames becomes a separate cause of his more marked degeneration.\n\nNakedness, the lack of a dwelling, and the absence of all those useless things we deem so necessary are therefore no great misfortune for these first men, and above all no great obstacle to their survival. If they have no furry hide, they need none in warm countries, and in cold countries they soon learn to put on the skins of animals they have overcome. If they have only two feet to run with, they have two arms to meet their needs and defend themselves. Their children may walk late and with difficulty, but their mothers can carry them easily, an advantage denied to other species, whose mothers, when pursued, must abandon their young or slow their pace to match theirs. Finally, unless we suppose those extraordinary and chance combinations of circumstances that I shall discuss later, which might very well never have occurred, it is clear in any event that the first man to make himself clothing or shelter obtained things he had little need of. He had managed without them until then, and there is no reason to think that as an adult he could not bear the way of life he had borne since childhood.\n\nAlone, idle, and always close to danger, savage man must love sleep and sleep lightly, like the animals, which think little and sleep, so to speak, whenever they are not thinking. Since his own preservation is almost his sole concern, the faculties he exercises most must be those chiefly devoted to attack and defense, whether to subdue his prey or to avoid becoming another animal's prey. The organs that develop only through ease and sensuality, by contrast, must remain in a coarse condition that excludes every sort of delicacy. His senses being divided in this way, he will have an extremely rough sense of touch and taste, but sight, hearing, and smell of the greatest subtlety. This is the animal condition in general, and, according to travelers' accounts, that of most savage peoples too. We should not be surprised, then, that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope can see ships on the open sea with the naked eye from as far away as the Dutch can see them with telescopes; or that the savages of America could track the Spaniards by scent as the best dogs might; or that all these barbarous nations bear their nakedness without trouble, sharpen their palate with quantities of pepper, and drink European liquors as though they were water.\n\nSo far I have considered only physical man; let us now try to view him from the metaphysical and moral side.\n\nIn every animal I see only an ingenious machine, endowed by nature with senses to keep itself working and to protect itself, up to a point, against whatever threatens to destroy or disrupt it. I perceive precisely the same things in the human machine, with this difference: nature alone performs every operation in the beast, whereas man participates in his own as a free agent. The one chooses or rejects by instinct, the other by an act of freedom. Thus the beast cannot depart from the rule prescribed to it, even when doing so would be to its advantage, while man often departs from his rule to his own detriment. A pigeon, for example, would starve beside a basin full of the finest meats, and a cat upon heaps of fruit or grain, although either could perfectly well nourish itself on the food it disdains, if only it thought to try it. So too dissolute men give themselves over to excesses that bring on fever and death, because the mind corrupts the senses, and the will still speaks when nature falls silent.\n\nEvery animal has ideas, since it has senses; it even combines its ideas up to a point. In this regard the difference between man and beast is only one of degree. Some philosophers have even maintained that there is more difference between one man and another than between a given man and a given beast. It is not, then, so much understanding that marks man off as a species among animals as his capacity to act freely. Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man experiences the same impulse but recognizes himself as free to yield or resist. It is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul is revealed: physics can in some measure explain the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas, but in the power to will—or rather to choose—and in the awareness of that power, we find only purely spiritual acts, which the laws of mechanics cannot explain.\n\nBut even if the difficulties surrounding all these questions left room for debate about this difference between man and animal, there is another, highly distinctive quality that separates them, one that admits no dispute: the faculty of perfectibility. With the help of circumstances, this faculty successively develops all the others; among us it resides in the species as well as in the individual, whereas an animal after a few months is what it will be for its whole life, and its species after a thousand years is what it was in the first year of those thousand. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile? Is it not because he thus returns to his original condition, while the beast, having acquired nothing and therefore having nothing to lose, always keeps its instinct, whereas man, losing again through age or other accidents all that his perfectibility had enabled him to acquire, falls even lower than the beast? It would be sad for us to have to admit that this distinctive and almost boundless faculty is the source of all man's misfortunes; that over time it draws him out of the original condition in which he would have passed tranquil and innocent days; that, bringing forth through the centuries his knowledge and his errors, his vices and his virtues, it makes him at length the tyrant of himself and of nature (Note 9). It would be dreadful to be obliged to praise as a benefactor the first man who suggested to a dweller on the banks of the Orinoco the use of those boards he fastens against his children's temples, thereby assuring them at least a portion of their original imbecility and happiness.\n\nSavage man, left by nature to instinct alone—or rather compensated for the instinct he perhaps lacks with faculties able at first to take its place, and later to raise him far above it—will therefore begin with purely animal functions (Note 10). Perceiving and feeling will be his first condition, one he shares with all animals. Willing and not willing, desiring and fearing, will be the first and almost the only operations of his soul until new circumstances bring about new developments in it.\n\nWhatever moralists may say, human understanding owes much to the passions, which, as everyone agrees, also owe much to it. It is through their activity that our reason grows more perfect. We seek knowledge only because we desire enjoyment; it is impossible to imagine why anyone without desires or fears would take the trouble to reason. The passions in turn arise from our needs, and develop through our knowledge; for we can desire or fear things only through the ideas we may have of them, or through a simple impulse of nature. Savage man, deprived of every kind of enlightenment, experiences passions only of this latter sort. His desires go no further than his physical needs (Note 11). The only goods he knows in the universe are food, a female, and rest; the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain, not death: for no animal will ever know what it is to die, and knowledge of death and its terrors was one of the first things man acquired as he departed from the animal condition.\n\n### Part One, 3\n\nIf it were necessary, I could easily support this view with facts and show that among all the nations of the world, the progress of the mind has been exactly proportionate to the needs given each people by nature or imposed on them by circumstances, and therefore to the passions that drove them to meet those needs. I would show the arts arising in Egypt and spreading with the floods of the Nile. I would follow their progress among the Greeks, where they were seen to sprout, grow, and rise to the heavens among the sands and rocks of Attica, yet could take no root on the fertile banks of the Eurotas. I would observe that northern peoples are generally more industrious than southern ones because they can less afford not to be, as though nature meant to balance things by giving their minds the fertility she denies their soil.\n\nBut without appealing to the uncertain testimony of history, who does not see that everything seems to remove from savage man both the temptation and the means to cease being savage? His imagination paints him nothing; his heart asks for nothing. His modest needs are so easily met close at hand, and he is so far from the degree of knowledge required even to wish for greater knowledge, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity. The spectacle of nature becomes indifferent to him through familiarity: it is always the same order, always the same cycles. His mind does not know how to wonder at the greatest marvels, and in him we must not look for the philosophy a man needs if he is to know how to observe, even once, what he has seen every day. His soul, untroubled by anything, surrenders to the mere feeling of its present existence, without any idea of the future, however near it may be; his plans, as limited as his horizon, scarcely extend to the end of the day. Such is even now the foresight of the Carib: he sells his cotton bed in the morning and comes back weeping in the evening to buy it again, having failed to foresee that he would need it the coming night.\n\nThe more we meditate on this subject, the wider the distance between mere sensations and the simplest knowledge appears to us; and it is impossible to conceive how a man could have crossed so vast an interval by his own powers alone, without the aid of communication and without the spur of necessity. How many centuries may have passed before men had occasion to see any fire but that of the sky! How many different accidents must have been required for them to learn the commonest uses of this element! How many times must they have let it go out before mastering the art of making it again! And how often, perhaps, did each of these secrets die with its discoverer! What shall we say of agriculture, an art requiring so much labor and foresight, dependent on other arts, quite clearly practicable only in a society that has at least begun to form, and useful to us less for drawing food from the earth, which would readily provide it anyway, than for forcing the earth to yield the things we most prefer? But suppose men had multiplied so much that nature's produce could no longer feed them—a supposition which, incidentally, would show a great advantage for the human species in that way of life. Suppose that without forges or workshops implements of cultivation had fallen from heaven into savage hands; that these men had overcome the mortal hatred they all feel for continuous work; that they had learned to foresee their needs so far ahead as to divine how to till the land, sow grain, and plant trees; that they had discovered how to grind wheat and ferment grapes—all things they had to have the gods teach them, because no one could conceive how they learned them by themselves. After all this, what man would be foolish enough to torment himself cultivating a field that the first comer, man or beast alike, would strip if its harvest suited him? How could anyone resolve to spend his life on painful labor when he is all the surer of not reaping its reward the more he needs it? In a word, how could such a situation lead men to cultivate the land so long as it had not been divided among them—that is, so long as the state of nature had not been destroyed?\n\nEven if we wished to suppose a savage man as skilled in the art of thinking as our philosophers make him; even if, following their example, we made him a philosopher himself, discovering the most sublime truths alone, deriving maxims of justice and reason through chains of highly abstract reasoning from love of order in general or from the known will of his creator; in a word, even if we supposed him to have as much intelligence and insight in his mind as he must have, and indeed is found to have, heaviness and stupidity—what benefit would the species draw from all this metaphysics, which could not be communicated and would perish with the individual who invented it? What progress could humankind make, scattered among animals in the woods? And how far could men improve or enlighten one another if, having no fixed home and no need of one another, they met perhaps scarcely twice in their lives, without knowing or speaking to each other?\n\nConsider how many ideas we owe to the use of speech; how much grammar exercises and assists the workings of the mind; and consider the inconceivable effort and boundless time the first invention of languages must have cost. Add these reflections to the preceding ones, and one may judge how many thousands of centuries would have been required to develop, one by one, the operations of which the human mind was capable.\n\nAllow me to consider for a moment the difficulties surrounding the origin of languages. I could content myself with citing or repeating here the investigations that the Abbé de Condillac has made on this subject, all of which fully support my view and perhaps first gave me the idea for it. But the way that philosopher resolves the difficulties he himself raises about the origin of conventional signs shows that he has assumed precisely what I call into question: namely, that a kind of society was already established among the inventors of language. While referring readers to his reflections, I believe I should add my own to them, in order to set the same difficulties in the light proper to my subject. The first difficulty is imagining how languages could have become necessary. Since men had no dealings with one another, and no need for any, we can conceive neither the need for this invention nor its possibility, unless it was indispensable. I could say, as many others have, that languages arose in the domestic intercourse of fathers, mothers, and children. But besides failing to resolve the objections, this would repeat the mistake of those who reason about the state of nature while carrying into it ideas drawn from society. They always picture the family assembled in one dwelling, its members maintaining a bond as close and lasting as among us, where so many common interests unite them. In that original condition, by contrast, with no houses, huts, or property of any sort, each lodged wherever chance took him, often for a single night. Males and females came together by chance, according to encounter, opportunity, and desire, without speech being a very necessary interpreter of what they had to tell each other; they parted just as readily (Note 12). At first the mother suckled her children for her own need; then, once habit had made them dear to her, she fed them for theirs. As soon as they were strong enough to seek food, they soon left the mother herself; and since there was almost no way to find one another again except by never losing sight of one another, they soon reached the point of no longer even recognizing each other. Observe, further, that the child has all its needs to express, and consequently more to tell its mother than she has to tell it. The child must therefore bear the greater part of the burden of invention, and the language it uses must largely be its own work. This yields as many languages as there are individuals to speak them; the wandering, nomadic life contributes further, allowing no idiom time to take on a settled form. To say that the mother dictates to the child the words it must use to ask her for this or that shows how languages already formed are taught; it does not tell us how they are formed.\n\nSuppose this first difficulty overcome. Let us cross for a moment the immense distance that must have lain between the pure state of nature and the need for languages, and inquire, assuming them necessary (Note 13), how they could have begun to take hold. Here is a new difficulty, worse even than the first: if men needed speech in order to learn to think, they needed even more to know how to think in order to discover the art of speech. And even if we understood how sounds of the voice were adopted as conventional interpreters of our ideas, we would still have to ask what could have interpreted this very convention for ideas which, having no sensible object, could be indicated neither by gesture nor by voice. We can thus scarcely form tolerable conjectures about the birth of this art of communicating one's thoughts and establishing intercourse between minds: a sublime art, already so far from its origin, yet still at such a prodigious distance from perfection in the philosopher's eyes that no one is bold enough to promise it would ever arrive there, even if the changes time necessarily brings were suspended for its sake, prejudices left the academies or fell silent before them, and the academies could devote themselves uninterruptedly to this thorny subject for whole centuries.\n\nThe first language of man, the most universal, the most forceful, and the only one he needed before he had to persuade men assembled together, is the cry of nature. Since this cry was wrung from him by a sort of instinct only on urgent occasions, to beg for help in great dangers or relief from violent suffering, it had little use in the ordinary course of life, where more moderate feelings prevail. When men's ideas began to widen and multiply, and closer communication grew between them, they sought more numerous signs and a more extensive language. They multiplied the inflections of the voice and added gestures, which are by nature more expressive and whose meaning depends less on prior agreement. They therefore expressed visible, moving objects by gestures and things that strike the ear by imitative sounds. But gesture can scarcely indicate anything but present objects, objects easy to describe, and visible actions; it cannot be used everywhere, for darkness or an intervening body renders it useless; and it demands attention rather than arousing it. In the end they thought to replace it with articulated speech, which, though it has no comparable connection to particular ideas, is better suited to represent them all as conventional signs. This substitution could only be made by common consent, and it was difficult enough for men whose crude organs had as yet had no practice; still more difficult to conceive in itself, since this unanimous agreement must have had a motive, and speech seems to have been very necessary for establishing the use of speech.\n\nWe must suppose that the first words men used had a far broader meaning in their minds than words have in languages already formed, and that, ignorant of the division of speech into its component parts, they at first gave each word the sense of a whole proposition. When they began to distinguish subject from predicate and verb from noun—no slight effort of genius—nouns at first were only so many proper names, the infinitive was the only form of verbs, and the notion of adjectives must have developed only with great difficulty, since every adjective is an abstract word, and abstraction is a laborious and unnatural operation. At first each object received its own name, without regard for genera and species, which these earliest founders could not distinguish; and all individuals appeared separately to their minds, as they do in nature's picture. If one oak was called A, another oak was called B; thus the narrower knowledge was, the longer the dictionary became. The difficulty of this entire nomenclature could not easily be overcome: to arrange beings under common, generic names, men had to know their properties and differences; they needed observations and definitions—that is, far more natural history and metaphysics than men of that time could have possessed.\n\n### Part One, 4\n\nMoreover, general ideas can enter the mind only with the aid of words, and understanding can grasp them only through propositions. This is one reason why animals cannot form such ideas or ever acquire the perfectibility that depends on them. When a monkey goes without hesitation from one nut to another, do we suppose it has the general idea of this kind of fruit and compares its archetype with these two particular nuts? Surely not. Rather, the sight of one recalls to its memory the sensations received from the other, and its eyes, affected in a certain way, announce to its taste the change it is about to undergo. Every general idea is purely intellectual; let imagination play the slightest part and the idea immediately becomes particular. Try to picture a tree in general: you will never succeed. In spite of yourself you must see it as small or large, sparse or leafy, light or dark; and if you could see in it nothing but what is found in every tree, the image would no longer resemble a tree. Purely abstract beings are seen in the same way, or conceived only through discourse. Only the definition of a triangle gives you its true idea: the moment you picture one in your mind, it is this triangle rather than another, and you cannot help giving its lines visible form or coloring its plane. We must therefore state propositions, must therefore speak, to have general ideas; for as soon as imagination comes to a halt, the mind can proceed only with the aid of discourse. If the first inventors could give names only to ideas they already had, it follows that the first nouns could only have been proper names.\n\nBut when, by means I cannot conceive, our new grammarians began to extend their ideas and generalize their words, the inventors' ignorance must have confined this method within very narrow limits. As they had first multiplied the names of individuals too much because they did not know genera and species, so afterward they made too few species and genera because they had not examined beings in all their differences. To carry the divisions far enough would have demanded more experience and enlightenment than they could possess, and more inquiry and labor than they wished to devote to it. Now if even today new species are discovered every day that had escaped every observation until now, consider how many must have escaped men who judged things only by their first appearance! As for primary classes and the most general notions, it is needless to add that these too must have eluded them. How, for example, could they have conceived or understood the words matter, spirit, substance, mode, figure, movement, when our philosophers, who have used them so long, have considerable trouble understanding them themselves, and when the ideas attached to those words are purely metaphysical, without any model in nature for those men to find? I stop at these first steps and beg my judges to pause in their reading here and consider how much ground language still had to cover from the invention of physical nouns alone—that is, from the easiest part of language to discover—before it could express every human thought, acquire a stable form, be spoken in public, and influence society. I beg them to reflect on how much time and knowledge it took to discover numbers (Note 14), abstract words, aorists and all the tenses of verbs, particles, syntax, the linking of propositions and arguments, and the entire logic of discourse. For my part, daunted by these multiplying difficulties and convinced that it is almost demonstrably impossible for languages to have arisen and become established by purely human means, I leave to anyone willing to undertake it the discussion of this difficult problem: which was more necessary, an already united society for the institution of languages, or already invented languages for the establishment of society?\n\nWhatever these origins may have been, the little care nature took to bring men together through mutual needs or to ease their use of speech shows us at least how little she prepared them for sociability, and how little she contributed to everything they did to forge its bonds. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine why, in that original condition, one man would have greater need of another than an ape or a wolf has of another of its kind; or, granting this need, what motive would induce the other to meet it; or even, if he did, how the two could agree on terms. I know we are told incessantly that nothing would have been so wretched as man in that condition; and if, as I believe I have proved, he could have had the desire and opportunity to leave it only after many centuries, the complaint would lie against nature, not against the man she had made in this way. But if I understand the word wretched rightly, it either has no meaning or signifies only painful deprivation and suffering of body or soul. I would like someone to explain to me what kind of wretchedness can belong to a free being whose heart is at peace and whose body is healthy. I ask which life, civil or natural, is more liable to become unbearable to those who live it. Around us we see hardly anyone who does not complain of his existence; many even take their own lives as far as they are able, and the combined force of divine and human laws is barely enough to check this disorder. I ask whether anyone has ever heard of a savage at liberty even thinking of complaining of life or taking his own life. Let us judge with less pride, then, where true misery lies. Nothing, on the contrary, would have been so wretched as savage man dazzled by knowledge, tormented by passions, and reasoning about a condition different from his own. It was by a very wise providence that the faculties he possessed in potential would develop only when opportunities arose to exercise them, so that they would neither be superfluous and burdensome to him before their time nor arrive too late to be useful when needed. In instinct alone he had everything required to live in the state of nature; in cultivated reason he has only what he needs to live in society.\n\nIt appears at first that men in this condition, having no moral relations with one another and no recognized duties, could be neither good nor wicked and had neither vices nor virtues—unless we take these words in a physical sense and call the qualities that may harm an individual's own preservation vices, and those that may contribute to it virtues. In that case we would have to call the man most virtuous who least resisted the simple impulses of nature. But without departing from the usual sense, we should suspend our judgment on such a condition and distrust our prejudices until, balance in hand, we have examined whether there are more virtues than vices among civilized men; whether their virtues are more beneficial than their vices are destructive; whether the growth of their knowledge sufficiently compensates for the harms they inflict on one another as they learn what good they ought to do each other; or whether, all things considered, they would be happier having neither evil to fear nor good to hope for from anyone than having submitted to universal dependence and bound themselves to receive everything from people who are bound to give them nothing.\n\nAbove all, let us not conclude with Hobbes that man is naturally wicked because he has no idea of goodness, vicious because he does not know virtue, that he always refuses his fellows services he does not believe he owes them, or that, by virtue of the right he reasonably claims to things he needs, he foolishly imagines himself sole owner of the whole universe. Hobbes saw very well what was lacking in all modern definitions of natural right; but the conclusions he draws from his own show that he understands it in a sense no less false. Reasoning from the principles he establishes, this author ought to have said that since the state of nature is the condition in which care for our own preservation is least harmful to that of others, it is consequently the condition best suited to peace and most fitting for the human race. He says precisely the opposite, because he wrongly includes in savage man's care for his preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions that are the work of society and that have made laws necessary. The wicked man, he says, is a robust child; what remains to be seen is whether savage man is a robust child. Even if we granted him this, what would he conclude? That if this man, once robust, were as dependent on others as when weak, there is no excess he would not commit: he would beat his mother when she took too long to give him the breast, strangle one of his little brothers when bothered by him, bite the leg of another when jostled or disturbed. But to be robust and dependent are two contradictory conditions in the state of nature: man is weak when dependent, and free of dependence before he is robust. Hobbes failed to see that the very cause that prevents savages from using their reason, as our jurists claim, also prevents them from abusing their faculties, as he claims himself. One might therefore say that savages are not wicked precisely because they do not know what it is to be good; for it is neither the growth of enlightenment nor the restraint of law but the calm of their passions and their ignorance of vice that keep them from wrongdoing: tanto plus in illis proficit vitiorum ignoratio, quàm in his cognitio virtutis. There is, moreover, another principle that Hobbes did not perceive, given to man to soften in certain circumstances the ferocity of his amour-propre, or his desire for self-preservation before that amour-propre arose (Note 15). It tempers the intensity of his concern for his own welfare through an innate reluctance to see a fellow creature suffer. I do not think I need fear contradiction in granting man the only natural virtue that even the most extreme detractor of human virtues has been forced to recognize. I mean pity: a disposition fitting for beings as weak and subject to as many ills as we are, a virtue all the more universal and useful to man because it precedes all reflection in him, and so natural that even beasts sometimes show visible signs of it. Not to mention the tenderness of mothers for their young and the dangers they brave to protect them, we observe daily how reluctant horses are to trample a living body. An animal cannot pass a dead animal of its own species without unease; some even give their dead a kind of burial. And the mournful bellowing of cattle entering a slaughterhouse reveals the impression made on them by the horrible sight before them. It is a pleasure to see the author of the Fable of the Bees, compelled to acknowledge man as a compassionate and feeling being, abandon his cool, subtle style in the example he gives, and offer us the moving image of a man shut inside who sees outdoors a ferocious beast tear a child from its mother's breast, crush its frail limbs in murderous jaws, and rip apart its throbbing entrails with its claws. What dreadful agitation must this witness feel at an event in which he has no personal stake? What anguish must he suffer at the sight, unable to offer any help to the fainting mother or the dying child?\n\nSuch is nature's pure impulse, prior to all reflection. Such is the power of natural pity that even the most depraved customs can scarcely destroy it: every day at the theater we see a man moved to tears by the misfortunes of some sufferer who, were he in the tyrant's place, would make his enemy's torments still worse. He resembles the bloodthirsty Sulla, so sensitive to suffering he had not caused, or that Alexander of Pherae who dared not attend a performance of any tragedy for fear that he would be seen grieving with Andromache and Priam, while listening without emotion to the cries of so many citizens slaughtered every day at his command:\n\nNature declares that she gave the human race the tenderest hearts, for she gave us tears.\n\nMandeville saw well that, for all their morality, men would only ever have been monsters had nature not given them pity to support reason; but he did not see that from this quality alone flow all the social virtues he wishes to deny them. What, indeed, are generosity, mercy, and humanity but pity applied to the weak, the guilty, or the human species in general? Benevolence and even friendship, rightly understood, are the products of a lasting pity fixed on a particular object: for what is the wish that someone should not suffer if not the wish that he should be happy? Even if compassion were nothing but a feeling that places us in the sufferer's position—a feeling obscure and vivid in savage man, developed but weak in civil man—what bearing would that idea have on the truth of what I say, except to strengthen it? Compassion will be all the more powerful the more closely the animal watching identifies with the animal suffering. It is evident, then, that this identification must have been infinitely closer in the state of nature than in the state of reasoning. Reason gives birth to amour-propre, and reflection strengthens it. Reflection turns man inward, separating him from everything that troubles or afflicts him; philosophy isolates him. Thanks to philosophy, at the sight of a man suffering he says in secret, “Perish if you will; I am safe.” Only dangers to society as a whole can disturb the philosopher's peaceful sleep and draw him from his bed. A fellow man can be slaughtered with impunity beneath his window; he need only put his hands over his ears and reason a little to prevent nature, which rebels within him, from making him identify with the man being murdered. Savage man has no such admirable talent, and for want of wisdom and reason we see him always giving himself heedlessly to the first feeling of humanity. In riots and street fights the crowd gathers, the prudent man moves away: it is the rabble, the women of the market, who separate the combatants and prevent respectable people from butchering one another.\n\n### Part One, 5\n\nIt is certain, then, that pity is a natural feeling which, by moderating the activity of self-preservation in each individual, contributes to the mutual preservation of the entire species. It is pity that moves us, without reflection, to help those we see suffering; pity that, in the state of nature, takes the place of laws, customs, and virtue, with the advantage that no one is tempted to disobey its gentle voice; pity that will prevent any sturdy savage from taking the hard-won food of a weak child or an infirm old man, if he hopes to find his own elsewhere. Instead of that sublime maxim of reasoned justice, “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” pity inspires in all men another maxim of natural goodness, far less perfect but perhaps more useful: “Do what is good for you with as little harm to others as possible.” In short, it is in this natural feeling, rather than in subtle arguments, that we must seek the cause of the reluctance every man would feel to do wrong, even apart from the maxims of education. Though Socrates and minds of his caliber may be able to attain virtue by reasoning, the human race would have vanished long ago if its survival had depended solely on the reasoning of its members. With passions so little active and a restraint so salutary, men, more untamed than wicked and more intent on protecting themselves from harm than tempted to harm others, were not subject to very dangerous quarrels. They had no dealings of any kind with one another and consequently knew neither vanity nor standing, neither esteem nor contempt. They had not the slightest notion of yours and mine, nor any true idea of justice. They regarded violence suffered as an evil easily remedied, not an injury calling for punishment, and gave no thought even to revenge, except perhaps mechanically and on the spot, like a dog biting the stone thrown at it. Their disputes would rarely have ended in blood had there been no more sensitive cause for them than food; but I see a more dangerous cause, of which I must still speak.\n\nAmong the passions that stir the human heart is one ardent and impetuous, making each sex need the other: a terrible passion that defies every danger, overthrows every obstacle, and in its fury seems fit to destroy the human race it is destined to preserve. What will become of men in the grip of this unbridled, brutal frenzy, without modesty or restraint, fighting each day for their loves at the price of their blood? We must first admit that the more violent the passions, the more necessary laws are to contain them. But the disorders and crimes that these passions cause among us every day show plainly enough how inadequate laws are in this respect; and we would do well to ask whether these disorders arose along with the laws themselves. For if so, even supposing laws could suppress them, the least we should demand of laws would be that they stop an evil that would not exist without them.\n\nLet us begin by distinguishing the moral from the physical element in the feeling of love. The physical is the general desire that moves one sex to unite with the other; the moral is what determines this desire and fixes it exclusively on a single object, or at least lends it greater intensity for the object preferred. Now it is easy to see that the moral element of love is an artificial feeling, born of life in society and cultivated by women with great skill and care to establish their dominion and make the sex that ought to obey the ruling one. Because this feeling rests on certain notions of merit or beauty that a savage cannot possess, and on comparisons he cannot make, it must be almost nonexistent for him. Just as his mind cannot form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion, so his heart cannot be moved to admiration and love, feelings born, even without our awareness, from the application of those ideas. He heeds only the temperament nature has given him, not a taste he has never been able to acquire, and any woman will do for him.\n\nConfined to the physical element of love, and fortunate enough to know nothing of the preferences that inflame the feeling and increase its difficulties, men must feel the fires of desire less frequently and less keenly, and consequently have fewer and less cruel disputes among themselves. Imagination, which wreaks such havoc among us, says nothing to untamed hearts. Each calmly awaits the impulse of nature, yields to it without choosing, with more pleasure than fury, and once the need is satisfied, all desire dies away.\n\nIt is therefore beyond dispute that love itself, like every other passion, acquired only in society the impetuous ardor that so often makes it fatal to men. It is all the more absurd to portray savages as forever cutting one another's throats to satisfy their lust when this opinion directly contradicts experience. The Caribs, of all existing peoples the one that has so far departed least from the state of nature, are precisely the most peaceable in love and the least prone to jealousy, although they live in a scorching climate that seems always to give these passions greater force.\n\nAs for the inferences one might draw from the fights between males of several animal species—fights that keep our farmyards bloody throughout the year or fill our forests with cries in spring when males contest a female—we must first exclude every species in which nature has plainly established a different relation of strength between the sexes from that found among us. Thus the fights of cocks yield no inference about the human species. In species where the proportion is better observed, these fights can only arise from a scarcity of females relative to males, or from exclusive periods during which the female consistently refuses the male's approach, which amounts to the first cause: if each female accepts the male for only two months of the year, it is, in this respect, as though the number of females were smaller by five sixths. Neither case applies to the human species, where females generally outnumber males and where no one has ever observed females, even among savages, to have periods of heat and exclusion like those of other species. Moreover, in several of these animals the entire species becomes excited at once, producing a terrible moment of common ardor, tumult, disorder, and combat: a moment that does not occur in the human species, where love is never periodic. We cannot, therefore, infer from the fights of certain animals over females that the same would happen to man in the state of nature. Even if we could draw that conclusion, since these conflicts do not destroy the other species, we should at least suppose they would be no more fatal to our own; and it is quite clear that they would cause still less devastation there than they do in society, especially in countries where morals still count for something, and the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands cause duels, murders, and worse every day; where the duty of everlasting fidelity serves only to produce adultery; and where the very laws of chastity and honor necessarily extend debauchery and multiply abortions.\n\nLet us conclude that savage man, wandering the forests without industry, speech, a home, war, or ties, with no need of his fellows and no desire to harm them, perhaps without ever recognizing any one of them individually, subject to few passions and sufficient in himself, had only the feelings and understanding suited to that condition. He felt only his real needs, looked only at what he thought it in his interest to see, and his intelligence advanced no further than his vanity. If chance led him to make a discovery, he was all the less able to communicate it because he did not even recognize his children. The skill died with its inventor. There was neither education nor progress; generations multiplied to no purpose, and each always beginning at the same point, the centuries passed in all the coarseness of the earliest ages. The species was already old, and man remained forever a child.\n\nIf I have dwelt so long on the supposition of this primitive condition, it is because I have ancient errors and deep-rooted prejudices to destroy. I thought it necessary to dig down to the root and to show, in a portrait of the true state of nature, how far inequality, even natural inequality, is from having in that state the reality and influence our writers claim for it. Indeed, it is easy to see that many of the differences distinguishing men are thought natural when they are entirely the work of habit and of the various ways of life men adopt in society. Thus a robust or delicate constitution, and the strength or weakness that results from it, often owe more to a harsh or pampered upbringing than to the body's original makeup. The same holds for powers of mind. Not only does education create a difference between cultivated minds and uncultivated ones; it increases the differences among cultivated minds in proportion to their cultivation. Let a giant and a dwarf walk the same road: every step each takes gives the giant a fresh advantage. Compare the prodigious variety of education and ways of life prevailing among the different ranks of civil society with the simplicity and uniformity of animal and savage life, where all eat the same foods, live in the same manner, and do exactly the same things. We then understand how much smaller the difference between one man and another must be in the state of nature than in society, and how much natural inequality in the human species must be increased by institutional inequality.\n\nBut even if nature showed as much favoritism in distributing its gifts as people claim, what advantage could the most favored gain at the expense of others in a condition allowing almost no relations among them? Where there is no love, what use is beauty? What use is intelligence to people who do not speak, or cunning to people who have no dealings? I constantly hear it said that the strong will oppress the weak; but let someone explain what is meant by this word oppression. Some will rule by violence, while others groan, enslaved to all their whims. That is precisely what I observe among us, but I cannot see how it could be said of savage men, to whom one would have great difficulty even explaining what servitude and dominion are. A man might seize the fruit another has picked, the game he has killed, the cave that sheltered him; but how could he ever get him to obey, and what chains of dependence could bind men who own nothing? If I am driven from one tree, I need only go to another. If I am tormented in one place, who will stop me from moving elsewhere? Is there a man so much stronger than I, and moreover so depraved, lazy, and fierce, that he can force me to provide for his subsistence while he remains idle? He must resolve not to let me out of his sight for a single instant, and to keep me very carefully tied while he sleeps, for fear that I escape or kill him. That is to say, he is obliged voluntarily to undertake a burden far greater than the one he wishes to escape, and greater than the one he imposes on me. After all that, does his vigilance slacken for a moment? Does an unexpected noise turn his head? I take twenty steps into the forest, my shackles are broken, and he never sees me again.\n\nWithout needlessly prolonging these details, everyone must see that the bonds of servitude are formed only from men's mutual dependence and the reciprocal needs that unite them. It is impossible to enslave a man without first putting him in a position where he cannot do without another; since this situation does not exist in the state of nature, everyone there remains free from the yoke, and the law of the strongest is rendered vain.\n\nHaving shown that inequality is scarcely perceptible in the state of nature and that its influence there is almost nothing, I must now show its origin and its progress through the successive development of the human mind. I have shown that perfectibility, the social virtues, and the other faculties natural man had received as latent powers could never develop of themselves; that they required the chance concurrence of several external causes which might never have arisen and without which he would have remained forever in his primitive condition. I must now consider and bring together the various accidents that may have perfected human reason while degrading the species, made a being wicked by making him sociable, and at last brought man and the world from so distant a starting point to the condition in which we see them.\n\nI admit that the events I must describe could have happened in several ways, and that I can choose among them only by conjecture. But besides the fact that conjectures become grounds for reasoning when they are the most probable ones we can draw from the nature of things and the only means we have of discovering the truth, the conclusions I wish to draw from mine will not thereby be conjectural. For on the principles I have just established, no other account could be constructed that would not yield me the same results and allow me to draw the same conclusions.\n\nThis relieves me of the need to extend my reflections on the way the passage of time compensates for the slight probability of events; on the astonishing power of very slight causes when they act without ceasing; on the impossibility, on the one hand, of disproving certain hypotheses when, on the other, one cannot give them the certainty of facts; on how, when two facts are given as real and need to be connected by a series of intermediate facts that are unknown or regarded as such, it falls to history, when available, to supply the connecting facts, and to philosophy, in its absence, to identify similar facts that could connect them; and finally on how, where events are concerned, resemblance reduces facts to a far smaller number of distinct classes than one might imagine. It is enough for me to offer these matters to the consideration of my judges; it is enough that I have arranged for ordinary readers not to need to consider them.\n\n### Part Two, 1\n\nPART TWO.\n\nThe first man who enclosed a plot of land, thought of saying “This is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how much misery and horror would have been spared the human race by someone who pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried to his fellows, “Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to everyone and the earth to no one!” But it is very likely that by then things had reached a point where they could no longer remain as they were. For this idea of property, depending on many prior ideas that could only have arisen in succession, did not take shape in the human mind all at once. Many advances had to be made, much skill and knowledge acquired, passed on and increased from age to age, before this last stage of the state of nature could be reached. Let us therefore take up the story from farther back and try to gather into a single view this slow succession of events and discoveries in their most natural order.\n\nMan's first feeling was that of his own existence; his first concern was his preservation. The earth's produce supplied everything he needed; instinct prompted him to use it. Hunger and other appetites made him experience, in turn, different ways of existing; one of these invited him to perpetuate his species. This blind inclination, devoid of any feeling of the heart, produced only a purely animal act. Once the need was satisfied, the two sexes no longer recognized each other, and even the child meant nothing more to its mother as soon as it could do without her.\n\nSuch was the condition of man at his beginning; such was the life of an animal at first limited to pure sensation, scarcely making use of nature's gifts, far from thinking to wrest anything from her. But difficulties soon arose, and he had to learn to overcome them. The height of trees kept him from reaching their fruit; animals competed for the same food; the fierceness of those that threatened his own life compelled him to exercise his body. He had to become agile, swift in running, vigorous in combat. Natural weapons, branches and stones, soon lay ready to hand. He learned to surmount nature's obstacles, to fight other animals when necessary, to contest his subsistence even with other men, or to compensate himself for what he had to yield to the stronger. As the human race spread, hardships multiplied along with men. Differences of terrain, climate, and season may have forced them to introduce differences into their ways of life. Barren years, long harsh winters, and scorching summers that consumed everything called for new ingenuity. Beside seas and rivers they invented the line and hook, becoming fishermen and eaters of fish. In forests they made bows and arrows and became hunters and warriors. In cold lands they covered themselves with the skins of beasts they had killed. Thunder, a volcano, or some fortunate accident brought them knowledge of fire, a new resource against the severity of winter. They learned to preserve this element, then to reproduce it, and at last to cook with it the meat they had previously devoured raw. Repeatedly relating different beings to himself and to one another must naturally have engendered in man's mind a perception of certain relations. These relations, which we express by the words large, small, strong, weak, fast, slow, timid, bold, and other such ideas, compared when needed and almost without thought, finally produced in him some kind of reflection—or rather a mechanical prudence that pointed out the precautions most necessary for his safety.\n\nThe new knowledge resulting from this development increased his superiority over other animals by making him aware of it. He practiced laying traps for them; he deceived them in a thousand ways. Though many surpassed him in fighting strength or running speed, in time he became master of some of those that could serve or hurt him, and the scourge of the rest. Thus the first glance he cast at himself stirred the first movement of pride; thus, though scarcely able yet to distinguish ranks, and viewing his species as occupying the highest, he was already preparing, in the distance, to claim that rank for himself as an individual. Though his fellow men were not to him what they are to us, and he had hardly more dealings with them than with other animals, they were not forgotten in his observations. The similarities that time allowed him to notice among them, his female, and himself led him to judge similarities he could not see. Observing that they all behaved as he would have done in like circumstances, he concluded that their ways of thinking and feeling were entirely like his own. Once firmly established in his mind, this important truth led him, by an intuition as reliable as and swifter than dialectic, to follow the best rules of conduct for his own advantage and safety in dealing with them.\n\nTaught by experience that the desire for well-being is the sole motive of human actions, he became able to distinguish the rare occasions on which common interest would allow him to count on his fellows' help, and the still rarer occasions on which competition required him to distrust them. In the first case he joined them in a band, or at most in some kind of free association that bound no one and lasted only as long as the passing need that had brought it together. In the second, each sought his own advantage, by open force if he believed he could prevail, or by cleverness and cunning if he felt weaker.\n\nThis is how men could gradually acquire some rough idea of mutual commitments and the advantage of honoring them, but only so far as immediate and palpable interest required. Foresight meant nothing to them: far from attending to a distant future, they did not even think of the next day. If a deer was to be caught, each understood that he must faithfully hold his post; but should a hare pass within reach of one of them, there can be no doubt that he would pursue it without scruple and, once he had caught his prey, care very little that he had made his companions miss theirs. It is easy to understand that dealings of this kind called for a language hardly more refined than that of crows or monkeys, which gather in much the same way. Inarticulate cries, many gestures, and a few imitative sounds must for a long time have made up the universal language. In each region these acquired a few articulate and conventional sounds whose origin, as I have already said, is not very easy to explain. Thus particular languages arose, but they were crude and imperfect, much like those still spoken today by various savage nations. I pass over multitudes of centuries in a flash, pressed by passing time, by the abundance of things I have to say, and by the almost imperceptible progress of beginnings; for the more slowly events followed one another, the more quickly they can be described. These first advances at last put man in a position to make swifter ones. The more enlightened the mind became, the more skill improved. Soon, no longer falling asleep under the first tree or retreating into caves, people found kinds of axes made of hard, sharp stones, useful for cutting wood, digging into the earth, and making huts of branches, which they later thought to coat with clay and mud. This was the time of a first revolution, which brought about the establishment and separation of families and introduced a kind of property; perhaps many quarrels and fights already arose from it. Yet since the strongest were probably the first to build themselves shelters they felt capable of defending, we may believe that the weak found it quicker and safer to imitate them than to try to drive them out. And of those who already had huts, each must have had little wish to take possession of his neighbor's, less because it did not belong to him than because he had no use for it and could not seize it without exposing himself to a fierce fight with the family living there.\n\nThe first developments of the heart came from a new situation that brought husbands and wives, fathers and children together in a shared dwelling. The habit of living together gave rise to the gentlest feelings known to men, conjugal love and parental love. Each family became a small society, all the more closely united because mutual affection and freedom were its only bonds. It was then that the first difference arose in the way the two sexes lived, for until then they had lived in the same way. Women became more settled and grew accustomed to tending the hut and children, while the man went out to seek food for them all. Both sexes also began to lose something of their wildness and vigor through a somewhat softer life. But if each separately became less fit to fight wild beasts, it became easier to gather together and resist them in common.\n\nIn this new condition, with a simple, solitary life, very limited needs, and the tools they had invented to meet them, men enjoyed great leisure and used it to obtain various conveniences unknown to their fathers. This was the first yoke they imposed upon themselves without realizing it, and the first source of evils they prepared for their descendants. For besides continuing in this way to soften body and mind, these conveniences lost nearly all their charm through habit while at the same time degenerating into real needs. To be deprived of them became much more painful than possessing them was pleasant, and people were unhappy to lose them without being happy to have them.\n\nWe can see a little more clearly here how the use of speech gradually arose or developed within each family, and we may also conjecture how various particular causes could extend language and hasten its progress by making it more necessary. Great floods or earthquakes surrounded inhabited districts with water or chasms; changes in the globe detached and cut off parts of the mainland as islands. It is understandable that among men thus brought close together and forced to live together, a common idiom would form sooner than among those roaming freely through the forests of the mainland. It is therefore quite possible that, after their first attempts at navigation, islanders brought the use of speech among us; and it is at least very likely that society and languages originated on islands and developed there before becoming known on the continent.\n\nEverything begins to change its face. Men who until now have wandered through the woods settle into a more fixed way of life; slowly they draw together, unite in various bands, and finally form a distinct nation in each region, united in customs and character not by rules and laws but by the same food and way of life and by the shared influence of the climate. Permanent proximity cannot fail in the end to create some ties between different families. Young people of different sexes live in neighboring huts; the passing intimacy nature demands soon leads, through their frequent meetings, to another intimacy no less sweet and more lasting. People become accustomed to considering different objects and making comparisons; gradually they acquire ideas of merit and beauty that produce feelings of preference. By seeing one another so often, they become unable to do without seeing one another again. A tender and gentle feeling enters the soul and at the slightest resistance becomes an impetuous fury. Jealousy wakes with love; discord triumphs, and the gentlest of passions receives sacrifices of human blood.\n\nAs ideas and feelings follow one another, and mind and heart find exercise, the human race continues to grow more accustomed to life together; connections spread and bonds tighten. People took to gathering before their huts or around a great tree. Song and dance, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement—or rather the occupation—of idle men and women gathered together. Each began to look at others and to want to be looked at in turn, and public esteem acquired a value. Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was most beautiful, strongest, most skillful, or most eloquent, became the most highly regarded. This was the first step toward inequality and at the same time toward vice. From these first preferences sprang vanity and contempt on one side, shame and envy on the other; and the ferment caused by these new leavens at last produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.\n\n### Part Two, 2\n\nAs soon as men began to value one another and the idea of esteem took shape in their minds, each claimed a right to it, and no one could be denied it without consequence. From this arose the first duties of civility, even among savages, and from this every deliberate wrong became an affront: beyond the harm caused by an injury, the person injured saw contempt for himself in it, often harder to bear than the harm itself. Thus, as each punished the contempt shown him in proportion to his own estimate of himself, acts of revenge became terrible, and men became bloodthirsty and cruel. This is precisely the stage most of the savage peoples known to us had reached. It is because several writers failed to distinguish ideas carefully enough and to notice how far these peoples already stood from the first state of nature that they hastened to conclude that man is naturally cruel and needs government to soften him. Yet nothing is gentler than man in his primitive condition, when nature has placed him at equal distances from the stupidity of beasts and the fatal enlightenment of civilized man, and when instinct and reason alike limit him to protecting himself from threatened harm. Natural pity restrains him from doing harm to anyone, since nothing impels him to it, even after he has himself suffered harm. For, according to the wise Locke's axiom, there can be no injury where there is no property.\n\nBut we must observe that once society had begun and relations were established among men, they needed qualities different from those their original constitution had given them. As moral considerations began to enter human actions, and before there were laws each man was the sole judge and avenger of the offenses he suffered, the goodness suited to the pure state of nature was no longer suited to emerging society. Punishments had to grow more severe as occasions for offense became more frequent, and the terror of revenge had to take the place of the restraint imposed by laws. Thus, although men had become less forbearing and natural pity had already suffered some change, this period in the development of human faculties, holding a just middle ground between the indolence of the primitive state and the restless activity of our amour-propre, must have been the happiest and most enduring age. The more we reflect on it, the more we find that this state was the least subject to upheaval, the best for man (Note 16), and that he must have left it only through some fatal accident that, for the common good, ought never to have happened. The example of savages, almost all of whom have been found at this stage, seems to confirm that the human race was made to remain there forever; that this state is the true youth of the world; and that all later progress has been, in appearance, so many steps toward the perfection of the individual, but in fact toward the decrepitude of the species.\n\nSo long as men were content with their rustic huts, so long as they confined themselves to stitching their skin garments with thorns or fishbones, adorning themselves with feathers and shells, painting their bodies in various colors, improving or decorating their bows and arrows, and carving a few fishing canoes or crude musical instruments with sharp stones—in short, so long as they devoted themselves only to tasks one person could accomplish and crafts that did not require the cooperation of several hands—they lived free, healthy, good, and happy to the extent their nature allowed, and continued to enjoy among themselves the pleasures of independent dealings. But the moment one man needed another's help, the moment people realized that it was useful for one person to hold provisions for two, equality disappeared, property entered in, work became necessary, and the vast forests turned into smiling fields that had to be watered with men's sweat, where slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout and grow along with the crops.\n\nMetallurgy and agriculture were the two arts whose invention brought about this great revolution. For the poet, gold and silver civilized men and ruined the human race; for the philosopher, it was iron and wheat. Both were unknown to the savages of America, who for that reason have always remained as they were. Other peoples even seem to have remained barbarous so long as they practiced one of these arts without the other. And perhaps one of the best reasons Europe became, if not sooner, then more consistently and thoroughly civilized than other parts of the world is that it has both the greatest abundance of iron and the most fertile land for wheat.\n\nIt is very hard to conjecture how men came to know and use iron. We cannot believe that, before knowing what would result, they themselves thought of extracting material from a mine and subjecting it to the preparations needed to melt it. On the other hand, this discovery can hardly be attributed to an accidental fire, since mines form only in arid places bare of trees and plants, so that nature seems to have taken precautions to hide this fatal secret from us. There remains only the extraordinary circumstance of a volcano spewing molten metals and giving observers the idea of imitating this operation of nature. Even then we must suppose them to have had great courage and foresight to undertake so arduous a task and to envision from so far off the advantages they might gain from it; qualities scarcely fitting even for minds more practiced than theirs could have been.\n\nAs for agriculture, its principle was known long before its practice was established. Men constantly occupied in drawing their subsistence from trees and plants could hardly have failed to gain quite early some notion of the means nature uses to reproduce plants. But their ingenuity probably turned in this direction only very late: perhaps because trees, together with hunting and fishing, supplied their food without needing their care; perhaps because they did not know how to use wheat; perhaps because they lacked tools to cultivate it, foresight about future needs, or the means to prevent others from appropriating the fruit of their labor. Once they grew more skillful, we may believe that with sharp stones and pointed sticks they began by cultivating a few vegetables or roots around their huts, long before they knew how to prepare wheat or possessed the tools needed for large-scale cultivation. Besides, to take up this occupation and sow land, one must be willing to lose something at first in order to gain much later—a precaution far removed from the cast of mind of savage man, who, as I have said, finds it hard enough in the morning to think of his evening needs.\n\nThe invention of other arts was therefore needed to force the human race to take up agriculture. As soon as men were needed to smelt and forge iron, other men were needed to feed them. The more workers multiplied, the fewer hands were employed in supplying food for all, though there were no fewer mouths to consume it. And since some needed foodstuffs in exchange for their iron, others at last discovered the secret of using iron to increase the supply of foodstuffs. From this arose, on the one hand, tillage and agriculture, and on the other, the art of working metals and multiplying their uses.\n\nCultivating land necessarily led to its division, and once property was recognized, to the first rules of justice: for each person to receive what is his, each must be able to have something. Moreover, as men began to look toward the future and each saw that he had some possessions to lose, none could fail to fear for himself retaliation for wrongs he might do to others. This origin is all the more natural because it is impossible to conceive the emerging idea of property arising from anything but labor. What, apart from his labor, can man contribute to make things he has not made his own? Labor alone gives the cultivator a right to the produce of the land he has tilled, and consequently to the land itself, at least until harvest. Repeated year after year, this makes a continuous possession that readily turns into property. When the ancients, says Grotius, gave Ceres the epithet of lawgiver and a festival celebrated in her honor the name Thesmophoria, they meant by this that the division of lands had produced a new kind of right: the right of property, different from the right arising from natural law.\n\nThings might have remained equal in this condition if talents had been equal and, for example, the use of iron and consumption of foodstuffs had always kept an exact balance. But nothing sustained that proportion, and it was soon broken. The stronger man did more work; the more skillful made better use of his; the more ingenious found ways to shorten labor. The plowman needed more iron, or the smith more wheat, and though they worked equally, one gained much while the other could barely live. Thus natural inequality gradually unfolds alongside inequality born of social arrangements. Differences between men, developed by differences in circumstance, become more perceptible, more lasting in their effects, and begin in like measure to influence the fortunes of individuals.\n\nWith things brought to this point, the rest is easy to imagine. I shall not pause to describe the successive invention of other arts, the progress of languages, the testing and employment of talents, the inequality of fortunes, the use or abuse of wealth, or all the details that follow, which everyone can easily supply. I shall confine myself to a glance at the human race placed in this new order of things.\n\nHere, then, are all our faculties developed: memory and imagination at work, amour-propre engaged, reason made active, and the mind brought almost to the limit of the perfection it can attain. Here are all our natural qualities called into play, the rank and fate of each man determined not only by the amount of his property and his power to help or harm, but by intelligence, beauty, strength or skill, merit or talents. And since these were the only qualities that could win esteem, one soon had to possess them or pretend to possess them; for one's own advantage one had to appear other than one really was. Being and seeming became two entirely different things, and from this division sprang ostentatious display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that attend them. On the other hand, man, formerly free and independent, now finds himself, through a multitude of new needs, subject, so to speak, to all of nature and above all to his fellows. In a sense he becomes their slave even as he becomes their master: if rich, he needs their services; if poor, he needs their help; even a modest livelihood does not put him in a position to do without them. He must therefore continually seek to interest them in his fate and make them find it, whether in fact or in appearance, profitable to work for his profit. This makes him deceitful and scheming with some, imperious and harsh with others, and compels him to exploit all those he needs when he cannot make them fear him and does not find it in his interest to serve them usefully. Finally, devouring ambition and the eagerness to raise one's relative fortune, less from any real need than to place oneself above others, inspire in all men a dark inclination to harm one another, a secret jealousy all the more dangerous because it often wears the mask of goodwill in order to strike more safely. In short, competition and rivalry on one side, conflicting interests on the other, and everywhere the hidden desire to profit at another's expense: all these evils are the first effect of property and the inseparable retinue of emerging inequality.\n\nBefore signs representing wealth were invented, wealth could scarcely consist of anything but lands and livestock, the only real possessions men could have. Now when holdings increased in number and extent until they covered the entire ground and bordered on one another, some could grow larger only at the expense of others. Those left over, whom weakness or indolence had prevented from acquiring holdings in their turn, became poor without having lost anything: everything around them had changed while they alone had not. They were forced to receive their subsistence from the hands of the rich or to wrest it from them. From this began to arise, according to the differing characters of each, dominion and servitude, or violence and plunder. The rich, for their part, had scarcely tasted the pleasure of ruling before they came to disdain all other pleasures. Using their old slaves to subdue new ones, they thought only of subjugating and enslaving their neighbors, like ravenous wolves that, having once tasted human flesh, reject all other food and wish only to devour men.\n\n### Part Two, 3\n\nThus the most powerful or the most destitute, making of their strength or their need a kind of right to another’s goods, equivalent, in their eyes, to the right of property, brought the end of equality and the most dreadful disorder in its wake. Thus the usurpations of the rich, the robberies of the poor, and everyone’s unbridled passions, stifling natural pity and the still faint voice of justice, made men greedy, ambitious, and wicked. Between the right of the strongest and the right of the first occupant there arose a perpetual conflict, ended only by combat and murder (Note 17). Nascent society gave way to the most terrible state of war: humanity, degraded and desolate, unable to retrace its steps or relinquish its ill-fated acquisitions, and working only to its own disgrace through abuse of the faculties that do it honor, brought itself to the brink of ruin.\n\nStunned by a strange new evil, the rich man and the poor\n\nLong to escape their wealth, and hate what they had wished for just before.\n\nMen could not fail, at last, to reflect on so wretched a situation and on the calamities overwhelming them. The rich especially must soon have felt how little they stood to gain from a perpetual war whose whole cost fell on them alone, while the risk to life was common to all and the risk to property theirs alone. Moreover, whatever color they gave their usurpations, they knew well enough that these rested on a precarious and abusive right, and that what force had won, force could take away without giving them any just cause to complain. Even those enriched solely by their own labor could scarcely ground their property on better titles. They might say, “I built this wall; I earned this land by my labor.” But they could be answered: “Who gave you the boundary lines, and by what right do you claim payment at our expense for work we never required of you? Do you not know that a multitude of your brothers perish, or suffer for want of what you have in excess, and that you needed the express and unanimous consent of the human race to appropriate from our common sustenance anything beyond your own share?” Without valid grounds for his defense, or sufficient strength to defend himself, able easily to crush one man but crushed in turn by bands of brigands, alone against everyone and unable, through mutual jealousy, to join his equals against enemies united by a common hope of plunder, the rich man, driven by necessity, finally conceived the most carefully considered scheme ever to enter the human mind. He would enlist on his side the very forces attacking him, turn his adversaries into his defenders, inspire them with new principles, and give them institutions as favorable to him as natural right was hostile.\n\nWith this in view, having laid before his neighbors the horror of a condition that armed them all against one another, made their possessions as burdensome as their wants, and left no one secure in poverty or in wealth, he readily devised plausible reasons to bring them around to his purpose. “Let us unite,” he told them, “to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure to each person the possession of what belongs to him. Let us establish rules of justice and peace binding on everyone, favoring no one, and in some measure correcting the whims of fortune by subjecting the powerful and the weak alike to mutual duties. In a word, instead of turning our strength against ourselves, let us gather it into a supreme power that governs us by wise laws, protects and defends every member of our association, repels our common enemies, and keeps us in everlasting concord.”\n\nFar less than even the equivalent of this speech was needed to carry away rough men easily beguiled, who had too many disputes among themselves to do without arbiters and too much greed and ambition to do without masters for long. All rushed to meet their chains, believing they were securing their liberty; for they had enough reason to perceive the advantages of a political order, but not enough experience to foresee its dangers. Those most capable of foreseeing abuses were precisely those who expected to profit from them, and even the wise saw that they must sacrifice part of their liberty to preserve the rest, as a wounded man has his arm amputated to save the rest of his body. Such was, or must have been, the origin of society and laws, which imposed new fetters on the weak and gave new strength to the rich (Note 18), destroyed natural liberty beyond recovery, fixed forever the law of property and inequality, turned a clever usurpation into an irrevocable right, and henceforth subjected the whole human race, for the profit of a few ambitious men, to labor, servitude, and misery. It is easy to see how the founding of one society made the founding of all the others indispensable, and how, to face united forces, men had to unite in turn. As societies multiplied or spread rapidly, they soon covered the whole surface of the earth; no corner of the world remained where anyone could shake off the yoke and withdraw his head from the often ill-directed sword that each man saw forever suspended over him. Civil law having thus become the common rule among citizens, the law of nature survived only between different societies. There, under the name of the law of nations, it was tempered by certain tacit agreements to make dealings possible and to make up for natural compassion, which, losing from society to society nearly all the strength it had possessed from man to man, survives only in a few great cosmopolitan souls. Crossing the imaginary barriers that divide peoples, these souls, like the sovereign being who created them, embrace the whole human race in their benevolence.\n\nPolitical bodies thus remaining in a state of nature toward one another soon felt the disadvantages that had forced individuals to leave it; between these great bodies, that state became even more disastrous than it had formerly been among their individual members. From this came national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals that make nature shudder and outrage reason, and all those horrible prejudices that rank the honor of spilling human blood among the virtues. The most upright people learned to count the slaughter of their fellow human beings among their duties; at last men were seen massacring one another by the thousand without knowing why. More murders were committed in a single day’s battle, and more horrors in the capture of a single city, than had been committed throughout the state of nature over entire centuries and across the whole face of the earth. Such are the first effects we can discern of humanity’s division into distinct societies. Let us return to their institution.\n\nI know that several writers have offered other origins for political societies, such as conquest by the most powerful or the union of the weak; the choice between these causes makes no difference to the point I wish to establish. Nevertheless, the origin I have just described seems to me the most natural, for the following reasons: 1. In the first case, the right of conquest is no right at all and therefore could found no other right. The conqueror and the conquered peoples remain in a state of war toward one another unless the nation, restored to full liberty, voluntarily chooses its conqueror as its leader. Until then, whatever terms of surrender may have been agreed, they rest on violence alone and are consequently void by their very nature; under this hypothesis there can be no true society, no political body, no law but that of the strongest. 2. In the second case, the words strong and weak are ambiguous. In the interval between the establishment of the right of property, or of first occupancy, and that of political governments, poor and rich better convey their meaning: before the laws, a man had no other means of subjecting his equals than by attacking their goods or giving them a share of his own. 3. Since the poor had nothing to lose but their liberty, they would have been profoundly foolish to surrender voluntarily the one good left to them for nothing in return. The rich, by contrast, were, so to speak, vulnerable in every part of their property and much easier to harm. They therefore had more precautions to take to protect themselves; and finally it is reasonable to believe that something was invented by those who benefited from it rather than by those it injured.\n\nThe new government had no fixed and regular form. For want of philosophy and experience, men saw only the troubles immediately before them, and thought of remedying others only as they arose. Despite all the labors of the wisest legislators, the political state remained imperfect, because it was almost the work of chance and, having begun badly, time could never repair the defects of its constitution, even as it revealed them and suggested remedies. Men went on patching it when they ought to have begun by clearing the ground and removing all the old materials, as Lycurgus did in Sparta, before raising a sound building. At first society consisted only of a few general agreements that every individual undertook to observe and that the community guaranteed to each. Experience had to show how weak such a constitution was, how easily offenders could escape detection or punishment for offenses of which the public alone was to be witness and judge. The law had to be evaded in a thousand ways, difficulties and disorders had to multiply without cease, before men finally thought of entrusting individuals with the dangerous charge of public authority and assigning magistrates the task of enforcing the people’s resolutions. For to say that leaders were chosen before the confederation was formed, and that ministers of the laws existed before the laws themselves, is a supposition that cannot seriously be argued against.\n\nIt would be no more reasonable to believe that peoples first cast themselves into the arms of an absolute master, unconditionally and irrevocably, and that the first means devised by proud, untamed men to secure their common safety was to plunge into slavery. Why, indeed, did they give themselves superiors if not to defend them from oppression and to protect their goods, their liberties, and their lives, which are, so to speak, the elements of their very being? Now, since the worst thing that can happen to one man in his relations with another is to find himself at that other’s mercy, would it not have defied common sense to begin by surrendering to a leader the very things whose preservation made his help necessary? What could he have offered them in exchange for the concession of so splendid a right? And if he had dared demand it on the pretext of defending them, would he not immediately have received the answer from the fable: “What more could the enemy do to us?” It is therefore beyond dispute, and the fundamental maxim of all political right, that peoples gave themselves leaders to defend their liberty, not to enslave them. “If we have a prince,” Pliny said to Trajan, “it is so that he may spare us having a master.”\n\nStatesmen employ the same sophisms about the love of liberty that philosophers have employed about the state of nature. From the things they see, they judge very different things they have not seen; from the patience with which the people before their eyes bear servitude, they attribute to mankind a natural inclination toward it. They forget that liberty is like innocence and virtue: we know its worth only while we possess it ourselves, and lose our taste for it as soon as we have lost it. “I know the delights of your country,” Brasidas said to a satrap who compared life in Sparta with life in Persepolis, “but you cannot know the pleasures of mine.”\n\nAs an untamed horse bristles its mane, stamps the ground, and struggles fiercely at the mere approach of the bit, while a trained horse patiently endures the whip and spur, the uncivilized man does not bow his head to the yoke that civilized man bears without a murmur; he prefers the most turbulent liberty to peaceful subjection. We must judge, then, the natural disposition of man for or against servitude not by the degradation of enslaved peoples, but by the prodigies wrought by all free peoples to guard against oppression. I know that the former never cease praising the peace and quiet they enjoy in their chains, and that “they call the most wretched slavery peace”; but when I see others sacrifice pleasure, rest, wealth, power, and life itself to preserve this one good so scorned by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free, abhorring captivity, dash their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of naked peoples of the wild despise European luxuries and defy hunger, fire, steel, and death simply to keep their independence, I feel that it is not for slaves to reason about liberty.\n\n### Part Two, 4\n\nAs for paternal authority, from which several writers have derived absolute government and all society, there is no need to invoke the contrary proofs of Locke and Sidney. It is enough to observe that nothing in the world is further from the ferocious spirit of despotism than the gentleness of that authority, which attends more to the advantage of the one who obeys than to the benefit of the one who commands; that by the law of nature a father is master of his child only so long as the child needs his help; that beyond this point they become equals, and the son, now wholly independent of his father, owes him respect alone, not obedience. Gratitude is indeed a duty to be rendered, but not a right that can be demanded. Instead of saying that civil society derives from paternal power, one ought, on the contrary, to say that paternal power draws its chief strength from civil society: a man was recognized as father of several children only when they remained gathered around him. The father’s goods, of which he truly is master, are the bonds that hold his children in dependence on him; he can give them a share in his estate only in proportion to their having earned it by continual deference to his wishes. Subjects, far from expecting any such favor from their despot, belong to him outright, themselves and all they possess—or so, at least, he claims. They are reduced to accepting as a favor whatever he leaves them of their own goods; he does them justice when he strips them of their property, and grants them mercy when he lets them live.\n\nIf we go on examining the facts in this way by the measure of right, we shall find no more validity than truth in the voluntary establishment of tyranny. It would be hard to demonstrate the validity of a contract binding only one party, placing everything on one side and nothing on the other, and working solely to the detriment of the one who undertakes it. This odious system is far from being, even today, the system of wise and good monarchs, above all the kings of France, as can be seen in several passages of their edicts and particularly in the following passage from a celebrated work published in 1667 in the name of and by order of Louis XIV: “Let no one say, then, that the sovereign is not subject to the laws of his State, since the contrary proposition is a truth of the law of nations which flattery has sometimes attacked, but which good princes have always defended as a tutelary divinity of their States. How much more rightful it is to say, with the wise Plato, that the perfect happiness of a kingdom lies in a prince being obeyed by his subjects, the prince obeying the law, and the law being just and always directed toward the public good.” I will not stop to ask whether, since liberty is man’s noblest faculty, to renounce without reserve this most precious of all his gifts, to submit to committing every crime its author forbids us so as to please a savage or senseless master, is not to degrade one’s nature, descend to the level of beasts enslaved by instinct, and even offend the author of one’s being; or whether that sublime craftsman should be more angered to see his finest work destroyed than dishonored. I will ask only by what right those who did not fear to debase themselves to this point could subject their descendants to the same disgrace and renounce on their behalf goods that do not come from their generosity, and without which life itself is a burden to all who are worthy of it.\n\nPufendorf says that, just as we transfer our property to others through agreements and contracts, we may likewise divest ourselves of liberty in another’s favor. That seems to me a very bad argument. First, the property I alienate becomes something entirely foreign to me, whose misuse is of no concern to me; but it matters to me that my liberty not be abused, and I cannot expose myself to becoming an instrument of crime, and thus guilty of the evil I shall be forced to do. Furthermore, since the right of property exists only by convention and human institution, every man may dispose at will of what he owns; but the same does not hold for nature’s essential gifts, such as life and liberty, which everyone may enjoy, but which it is far less certain anyone has the right to cast away. In taking away one, he degrades his being; in taking away the other, he destroys it insofar as he is able. And since no temporal good can compensate for either, to renounce them at any price would offend nature and reason together. But even if one could alienate liberty as one can property, the difference would be very great for children, who enjoy their father’s goods only through the transfer of his right, whereas their liberty is a gift they receive from nature as human beings, and their parents have no right to deprive them of it. Thus, just as establishing slavery required violence against nature, perpetuating that right required changing nature; the jurists who solemnly pronounced that the child of an enslaved woman would be born a slave decided, in other words, that a human being would not be born human.\n\nIt therefore seems certain to me not only that governments did not begin with arbitrary power—which is merely their corruption, their final extreme, and finally returns them to the very law of the strongest that they were originally meant to remedy—but also that, even had they begun in this way, that power, illegitimate by its nature, could not have founded the rights of society, and consequently could not have founded institutional inequality.\n\nWithout entering today into the inquiry still to be made into the nature of the fundamental compact of every government, I shall follow common opinion and confine myself to considering the establishment of the political body as a genuine contract between the people and the leaders they choose. By this contract both parties undertake to observe the laws stipulated in it, the bonds of their union. The people, having brought all their wills into one in matters of social relations, make every article in which this will finds expression a fundamental law binding on every member of the State without exception. One of these laws regulates the choice and powers of the magistrates charged with overseeing the execution of the others. That power extends to everything that can maintain the constitution, but not to changing it. Honors are added to make the laws and their ministers respected, and the ministers personally receive prerogatives to compensate them for the arduous work of good administration. The magistrate, on his side, undertakes to use the power entrusted to him only in accordance with the intention of those who entrusted it, to preserve everyone in the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to him, and always to prefer the public good to his own interest. Before experience had revealed, or knowledge of the human heart had foretold, the inevitable abuses of such a constitution, it must have seemed all the better because those charged with its preservation had themselves the greatest stake in preserving it. Since the magistracy and its rights rested solely on the fundamental laws, the moment those laws were destroyed, the magistrates would cease to be legitimate, the people would no longer be bound to obey them, and, since it was not the magistrate but the law that constituted the essence of the State, everyone would by right regain his natural liberty.\n\nA little attentive reflection would confirm this with fresh reasons, and the nature of the contract would show that it could not be irrevocable. For if there were no superior power to guarantee the fidelity of the contracting parties or compel them to fulfill their reciprocal commitments, the parties would remain sole judges in their own cause, and each would always retain the right to renounce the contract as soon as it found the other violating its terms or found those terms no longer suitable. The right to abdicate seems to rest on this principle. Now, considering, as we are, human institutions alone, if the magistrate, who holds all power in his hands and appropriates all the advantages of the contract, nonetheless had the right to renounce authority, the people, who pay for all their leaders’ faults, should have still greater right to renounce dependence. But the dreadful dissensions and endless disorders such a dangerous power would inevitably bring show, more than anything else, how much human governments needed a foundation more solid than reason alone, and how necessary it was to public peace that the divine will intervene to give sovereign authority a sacred and inviolable character, removing from subjects the disastrous right to dispose of it. Even if religion had done mankind no other good, this would be enough for everyone to cherish and embrace it, abuses and all, since it still spares more blood than fanaticism causes to flow. But let us follow the thread of our hypothesis. The various forms of government originate in the greater or lesser differences found among individuals at the moment of their institution. Was one man preeminent in power, virtue, wealth, or influence? He alone was elected magistrate, and the State became a monarchy. If several men, nearly equal among themselves, surpassed all the others, they were elected together, and there was an aristocracy. Those whose fortunes or talents were less unequal, and who had strayed least far from the state of nature, kept the supreme administration in common and formed a democracy. Time showed which of these forms was most beneficial to mankind. Some remained subject to laws alone; others soon obeyed masters. Citizens wanted to keep their liberty; subjects thought only of taking it from their neighbors, unable to bear that others should enjoy a good they themselves no longer possessed. In a word, on one side stood wealth and conquest, on the other happiness and virtue.\n\nUnder these various governments, all magistracies were at first elective, and when wealth did not prevail, preference went to merit, which gives a natural ascendancy, and to age, which brings experience in affairs and composure in deliberation. The elders of the Hebrews, the Gerontes of Sparta, the Senate of Rome, and even the etymology of our word Seigneur show how greatly old age was once respected. The more often men advanced in years were elected, the more frequent elections became and the more their difficulties were felt. Canvassing entered in, factions formed, parties grew bitter, civil wars broke out; at last the blood of citizens was sacrificed to the supposed happiness of the State, and society stood on the verge of falling back into the anarchy of former times. The ambition of leading men exploited these circumstances to perpetuate their offices within their families. The people, already accustomed to dependence, repose, and the comforts of life, and no longer able to break their chains, consented to deepen their servitude in order to secure their peace. In this way the leaders, now hereditary, grew accustomed to regarding their office as family property, themselves as owners of the State of which they had originally been mere officers, their fellow citizens as their slaves, numbering them like cattle among their possessions, and styling themselves the equals of gods and kings of kings.\n\nIf we follow the progress of inequality through these different revolutions, we shall find that the establishment of law and the right of property was its first stage; the institution of the magistracy its second; and the third and final stage the conversion of legitimate power into arbitrary power. Thus the condition of rich and poor was sanctioned by the first epoch, that of powerful and weak by the second, and that of master and slave by the third. This is the last degree of inequality, the end toward which all the others finally lead, until new revolutions dissolve the government altogether or bring it closer to its legitimate institution.\n\nTo understand why this progression was necessary, we must consider less the motives for establishing the political body than the form it takes in practice and the troubles that follow it. For the vices that make social institutions necessary are the same vices that make their abuse inevitable. With the sole exception of Sparta, where law chiefly oversaw the education of children and Lycurgus established customs that almost spared him the need to add laws, laws in general, being weaker than passions, restrain men without changing them. It would be easy to prove that any government that always proceeded exactly according to the purpose for which it was established, without corruption or alteration, would have been established needlessly; and a country in which no one evaded the laws or abused the magistracy would need neither magistrates nor laws.\n\n### Part Two, 5\n\nPolitical distinctions necessarily bring civil distinctions in their train. Inequality, growing between the people and their leaders, soon makes itself felt among individuals, taking a thousand forms according to passions, talents, and circumstances. A magistrate cannot usurp illegitimate power without making dependents for himself, to whom he is forced to yield some share of it. Besides, citizens submit to oppression only when, carried away by blind ambition and looking more below them than above, they prize domination more highly than independence and agree to wear chains so that they may put chains on others in turn. It is very difficult to bring into obedience a man who does not seek to command, and the cleverest statesman could not subjugate men who wished only to be free. But inequality spreads easily among ambitious and cowardly souls, always ready to take their chances with fortune and almost equally willing to dominate or to serve, according as fortune favors or opposes them. Thus a time was bound to come when the people’s eyes were so dazzled that their leaders had only to say to the least of men, “Be great, you and all your line,” and at once he seemed great to everyone, as well as to himself. His descendants rose higher still as they grew more distant from him: the remoter and more uncertain the cause, the greater its effect; the more idlers a family could count, the more illustrious it became.\n\nIf this were the place for details, I could easily explain how inequality of influence and authority becomes inevitable among individuals (Note 19) as soon as they are united in one society, compelled to compare themselves with one another and to take account of the differences they discover in their continual dealings with one another. These differences are of several kinds. But wealth, nobility or rank, power, and personal merit are the principal distinctions by which people measure one another in society; and I would show that the concord or conflict of these various forces is the surest indication of whether a State is well or badly constituted. I would show that, among these four kinds of inequality, personal qualities are the source of all the others, while wealth is the last form into which they ultimately resolve. For wealth is of the most immediate use to material well-being and the easiest to transfer, and can therefore readily be used to buy everything else. This observation enables us to judge fairly accurately how far each people has strayed from its original institution and how far it has gone toward the extreme of corruption. I would point out how this universal desire for reputation, honors, and precedence, which devours us all, calls forth and measures talents and strengths, how it excites and multiplies passions, and how, by making all men competitors, rivals, or rather enemies, it brings about reversals, successes, and catastrophes of every kind every day by setting so many contenders to run the same race. I would show that to this ardor to have ourselves talked about, this frenzy for distinction that keeps us almost always outside ourselves, we owe the best and the worst that mankind has produced: our virtues and our vices, our sciences and our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers—that is to say, a multitude of bad things and a small number of good ones. Finally, I would show that if a handful of powerful and wealthy men are seen at the summit of greatness and fortune while the multitude crawls in obscurity and misery, it is because the former value what they enjoy only to the extent that others are deprived of it; without any change in their own circumstances, they would cease to be happy if the people ceased to be miserable.\n\nBut these details alone would fill a substantial work. It would weigh the advantages and disadvantages of every government against the rights belonging to the state of nature and reveal all the different forms in which inequality has appeared down to our day and may appear in centuries to come, according to the nature of governments and the revolutions time will necessarily bring them. We would see the multitude oppressed at home as a consequence of the very precautions it had taken against threats from abroad. We would see oppression continually increase, while the oppressed could never know where it would end or what lawful means remained to stop it. We would see the rights of citizens and the liberties of nations gradually expire, and the protests of the weak treated as seditious mutterings. We would see policy restrict the honor of defending the common cause to a mercenary portion of the people. From this would arise the need for taxes; the discouraged farmer would leave his field even in peacetime and abandon the plow to gird on a sword. We would see the rise of the ruinous and bizarre rules of the code of honor. We would see the defenders of the fatherland sooner or later become its enemies, forever holding a dagger aloft over their fellow citizens; and a time would come when we would hear them say to their country’s oppressor:\n\nIf you order me to drive a sword into my brother’s breast and my father’s throat,\n\nAnd into the womb of my wife heavy with child,\n\nI will do it all, though my hand rebels.\n\nFrom the extreme inequality of conditions and fortunes, from the diversity of passions and talents, from useless arts, harmful arts, and frivolous sciences, would spring crowds of prejudices equally hostile to reason, happiness, and virtue. We would see leaders foster everything that can weaken men assembled together by setting them at odds; everything that can lend society the appearance of concord while sowing the seed of actual division within it; everything that can inspire mutual distrust and hatred among the different orders by setting their rights and interests against one another and thereby strengthen the power that keeps them all in check.\n\nFrom the heart of this disorder and these upheavals, despotism would gradually raise its hideous head. Devouring whatever good and healthy thing it encountered throughout the State, it would finally trample laws and people underfoot and establish itself on the ruins of the republic. The times preceding this last change would be times of turmoil and calamity, but in the end the monster would swallow everything, and peoples would no longer have leaders or laws, only tyrants. From that moment there would no longer be any question of morals or virtue. For wherever despotism reigns, “which has no hope from honorable conduct,” it tolerates no other master. As soon as it speaks, neither integrity nor duty may be consulted, and the blindest obedience is the only virtue left to slaves.\n\nThis is the final stage of inequality, the extreme point that closes the circle and touches the point from which we set out. Here all individuals become equal again because they are nothing. Subjects have no law but the master’s will, the master no rule but his passions, and the notions of good and the principles of justice vanish once more. Here everything returns to the law of the strongest alone, and consequently to a new state of nature, different from the state in which we began: the first was the state of nature in its purity, while this last is the fruit of an excess of corruption. Yet there is so little difference between these two states, and the contract of government is so completely dissolved by despotism, that the despot remains master only so long as he is strongest; as soon as he can be driven out, he has no complaint to make against violence. The uprising that ends by strangling or dethroning a sultan is as lawful an act as those by which, the day before, he disposed of his subjects’ lives and goods. Force alone sustained him, force alone overthrows him. Everything thus proceeds in the natural order; and whatever the outcome of these brief and frequent revolutions, no one can complain of another’s injustice, only of his own imprudence or misfortune.\n\nBy discovering and tracing in this way the forgotten and lost paths that must have led man from the natural state to the civil state, and by restoring, along with the intermediate stages I have just identified, those that the pressure of time has made me omit or that my imagination has not suggested, every attentive reader must be struck by the immense distance separating these two states. In this slow succession of events he will see the solution to countless problems of morality and politics that philosophers cannot resolve. He will sense that mankind in one age is not mankind in another, and that the reason Diogenes could find no man was that he sought among his contemporaries the man of an age that had vanished. Cato, he will say, perished with Rome and liberty because he was out of place in his own century; the greatest of men only astonished a world he would have ruled five hundred years earlier. In a word, he will explain how the human soul and its passions, changing imperceptibly, change their very nature, so to speak; why our needs and pleasures change their objects over time; why, as original man gradually disappears, society offers the wise observer nothing but a gathering of artificial men and fabricated passions, products of all these new relations, without any true foundation in nature. What reflection teaches us on this subject, observation fully confirms: the man of the wild and the civilized man differ so profoundly in heart and inclination that what brings one supreme happiness would drive the other to despair. The former breathes only rest and liberty; he wishes only to live and remain idle, and even the Stoic’s tranquility falls short of his deep indifference to every other aim. The citizen, by contrast, always busy, sweats, rushes about, and torments himself endlessly in search of still more laborious occupations. He works until death; he even hastens toward death to put himself in a position to live, or gives up life to gain immortality. He pays court to the great whom he hates and the rich whom he despises; he spares nothing to win the honor of serving them. He proudly boasts of his own abasement and their protection, and, proud of his slavery, speaks contemptuously of those who do not have the honor of sharing it. What a spectacle for a Caribbean native: the grueling, envied labors of a European minister! How many cruel deaths would that indolent man of the wild prefer to the horror of such a life, which is often not even softened by the pleasure of doing good? But to perceive the object of so much effort, the words power and reputation would have to mean something to him. He would have to learn that there are people who attach importance to the gaze of the rest of the world, who know how to be happy and content with themselves on the testimony of others rather than their own. This, indeed, is the true cause of all these differences: the man of the wild lives within himself; the sociable man, always outside himself, knows how to live only in the opinion of others, and draws, so to speak, the sense of his own existence from their judgment alone. It is not my subject to show how such a disposition gives rise to so much indifference toward good and evil amid such fine speeches about morality; how, everything being reduced to appearances, everything becomes artificial and performed—honor, friendship, virtue, and often even vice itself, which men finally discover the secret of boasting about; how, in a word, always asking others what we are and never daring to ask ourselves, amid so much philosophy, humanity, civility, and lofty principles, we have only a deceptive and frivolous exterior, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. It is enough for me to have shown that this is not man’s original state, and that the spirit of society alone, together with the inequality it engenders, so changes and disfigures all our natural inclinations.\n\nI have tried to set out the origin and progress of inequality, and the establishment and abuse of political societies, insofar as these things can be deduced from human nature by the light of reason alone, independently of the sacred doctrines that confer the sanction of divine right on sovereign authority. It follows from this account that inequality, almost nonexistent in the state of nature, draws its force and growth from the development of our faculties and the progress of the human mind, and finally becomes stable and legitimate through the establishment of property and laws. It follows also that moral inequality, authorized solely by positive law, is contrary to natural right whenever it does not correspond in like proportion to physical inequality. This distinction sufficiently establishes what we must think in this respect of the kind of inequality prevailing among all civilized peoples. For it is plainly against the Law of Nature, however one defines it, that a child should command an old man, that a fool should lead a wise man, and that a handful of people should overflow with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks the necessities of life.\n\n### Notes, 1\n\nNOTES\n\nNote 1\n\nHerodotus relates that, after the murder of the false Smerdis, the seven liberators of Persia assembled to deliberate on the form of government they would give the state, and Otanes argued strongly for a republic. This was an opinion all the more extraordinary in the mouth of a satrap because, quite apart from whatever claim he might have had to the empire, the great fear a form of government that forces them to respect other men more than they fear death. Otanes, as one might expect, was not listened to; and, seeing that they were about to elect a monarch, he, who wished neither to obey nor to command, voluntarily yielded his claim to the crown to the other contenders, asking as his sole compensation that he and his descendants be free and independent. This was granted him. Even if Herodotus had not told us of the restriction placed on this privilege, we should have had to assume one; otherwise Otanes, acknowledging no law of any kind and answerable to no one, would have been all-powerful in the state, more powerful even than the king. But it hardly seemed likely that a man capable of contenting himself with such a privilege in such circumstances would be capable of abusing it. Indeed, there is no sign that this right ever caused the slightest disturbance in the kingdom, whether through the wise Otanes or through any of his descendants.\n\nNote 2\n\nFrom my very first step I confidently rely on one of those authorities esteemed by philosophers, because they spring from a sound and lofty reason that philosophers alone know how to discover and feel.\n\n“However much interest we have in knowing ourselves, I do not know whether we do not know everything that is not ourselves better. Endowed by nature with organs intended solely for our preservation, we employ them only to receive impressions from outside; we seek only to spread ourselves outward and to exist outside ourselves. Too busy multiplying the functions of our senses and enlarging the outward extent of our being, we rarely make use of that inward sense which brings us back to our true dimensions and separates from us all that is not ours. Yet it is this sense we must employ if we wish to know ourselves; it is the only one by which we can judge ourselves. But how are we to give this sense its activity and its full scope? How are we to free our soul, where it resides, from all the illusions of our mind? We have lost the habit of using it; it has lain idle amid the tumult of our bodily sensations; it has been dried up by the fire of our passions. Heart, mind, senses: everything has worked against it.” Hist. Nat. T4, p. 151, On the Nature of Man.\n\nNote 3\n\nThe changes that long practice in walking on two feet may have produced in the human frame, the correspondences still observed between our arms and the forelegs of quadrupeds, and the inference drawn from the way they walk may have given rise to doubts about which way of walking must be most natural to us. All children begin by walking on all fours and need our example and instruction to learn to stand upright. There are even savage nations, such as the Hottentots, who neglect their children so much that they let them walk on their hands for so long that afterward they have great difficulty getting them upright; the children of the Caribs of the Antilles do as much. There are various examples of men who walked on all fours; among others I could cite the child found in 1344 near Hesse, where he had been raised by wolves, who later said at the court of Prince Henry that, had the choice been his, he would have preferred to return to them rather than live among men. He had grown so used to walking like those animals that pieces of wood had to be fastened to him to force him to stand upright and keep his balance on his two feet. So it was with the child found in 1694 in the forests of Lithuania, living among bears. He showed no sign of reason, says M. de Condillac; he walked on his feet and hands, had no language, and made sounds that bore no resemblance to those of a man. The little savage of Hanover brought to the court of England several years ago had the greatest difficulty making himself walk on two feet; and in 1719 two other savages were found in the Pyrenees, running through the mountains like quadrupeds. As for the objection that this would deprive us of the use of our hands, from which we derive so many benefits, besides the fact that the example of apes shows that a hand can very well be used both ways, it would prove only that man can assign his limbs a purpose more convenient than nature's, not that nature intended him to walk otherwise than she teaches him.\n\nBut there are, it seems to me, much better reasons for maintaining that man is a biped. First, even if one showed that he could originally have been shaped differently from the way we see him, yet eventually become what he is, that would not suffice to conclude that this is what happened. For having shown that such changes are possible, one would still have to show at least that they are plausible before accepting them. Moreover, if man's arms seem capable of serving him as legs when needed, that is the only observation favoring this theory among a great many others that contradict it. The chief ones are these: the way a man's head is attached to his body, instead of directing his gaze horizontally as it does in all other animals, and as it does in man himself when he walks upright, would, if he walked on all fours, keep his eyes fixed directly on the earth, a position hardly favorable to an individual's preservation; the tail he lacks, which he has no use for when walking on two feet, is useful to quadrupeds, and not one of them is without it; a woman's breasts, very well placed for a biped who holds her child in her arms, are so badly placed for a quadruped that none has them in that position; the hindquarters are excessively high in proportion to the forelegs, which is why we drag ourselves along on our knees when we go on all fours, and the whole arrangement would make for an ill-proportioned animal that walked awkwardly; if he put his foot down flat like his hand, his hind leg would have one joint fewer than other animals have, namely the joint connecting the cannon bone to the shinbone; and if he put down only the tip of his foot, as he would doubtless have been forced to do, the tarsus, quite apart from the number of bones composing it, seems too bulky to serve as a cannon bone, and its joints with the metatarsus and shinbone too close together to give the human leg in that position the same flexibility as the legs of quadrupeds. The example of children, drawn from an age when natural strength is not yet developed and the limbs have not grown firm, proves nothing at all; I might as well say that dogs are not meant to walk because they do nothing but crawl for some weeks after birth. Particular cases carry little weight against the universal practice of all mankind, even of nations that, having had no contact with others, could have imitated nothing from them. A child abandoned in a forest before he could walk and nursed by some animal would have followed his nurse's example by practicing walking as she did; habit could have given him abilities he did not owe to nature; and just as people without arms succeed through practice in doing with their feet everything we do with our hands, he would eventually have come to use his hands as feet.\n\nNote 4\n\nIf among my readers there should be someone so poor a natural philosopher as to challenge my assumption of the earth's natural fertility, I shall answer him with the following passage:\n\n“Since plants draw far more substance for their nourishment from air and water than from the earth, it follows that when they decay they return more to the earth than they have taken from it; moreover, a forest draws down rainwater by holding back the vapors. Thus, in a wood preserved untouched for a very long time, the layer of soil that sustains vegetation would increase considerably. But animals return less to the earth than they take from it, and men consume enormous quantities of wood and plants for fuel and other uses. It follows that the layer of fertile soil in an inhabited country must constantly diminish and at last become like the terrain of Arabia Petraea and that of so many other provinces of the East, which is in fact the region longest inhabited, where nothing is found but salt and sand; for the fixed salts of plants and animals remain, while all their other parts evaporate.” M. de Buffon, Hist. Nat.\n\nTo this one may add the evidence of fact: the abundance of trees and plants of every kind that filled almost all the uninhabited islands discovered in recent centuries, and what history tells us of the immense forests that had to be felled throughout the earth as it grew more populous and civilized. On this point I shall make three further observations. The first is that, if any kind of plant can make up for the loss of vegetable matter caused by animals, according to M. de Buffon's reasoning, it is above all trees, whose crowns and leaves collect and absorb more water and vapor than other plants do. The second is that the destruction of the soil—that is, the loss of the substance fit to nourish vegetation—must accelerate in proportion as the earth is more intensively cultivated and its more industrious inhabitants consume its produce of every sort in greater abundance. My third and most important observation is that the fruits of trees provide animals with more abundant nourishment than other plants can provide, a fact I have tested myself by comparing the yields of two plots equal in size and quality, one planted with chestnut trees and the other sown with wheat.\n\nNote 5\n\nAmong quadrupeds, the two most universal marks distinguishing the voracious species are drawn, one from the shape of their teeth, the other from the structure of their intestines. Animals that live only on plants all have flat teeth, such as the horse, ox, sheep, and hare; but voracious animals have pointed teeth, such as the cat, dog, wolf, and fox. As for intestines, fruit-eaters have certain parts, such as the colon, not found in voracious animals. It seems, then, that man, whose teeth and intestines resemble those of fruit-eating animals, should naturally be placed in that class; and not only do anatomical observations confirm this opinion, but the records of antiquity strongly favor it as well. “Dicaearchus,” says Saint Jerome, “reports in his Books of Greek Antiquities that under the reign of Saturn, when the earth was still fertile of itself, no man ate flesh, but all lived on fruits and vegetables that grew naturally.” (Lib. 2, Adv. Jovinian.) One can see from this that I pass over many advantages I could press into service. For prey is almost the only cause of conflict among carnivorous animals, whereas fruit-eaters live with one another in continual peace; if the human species belonged to the latter kind, clearly it would have found it much easier to survive in the state of nature, and would have had far less need and occasion to leave it.\n\nNote 6\n\nAll knowledge that requires reflection, all knowledge acquired only by connecting ideas and perfected only by degrees, seems altogether beyond the reach of savage man for want of communication with his fellows—that is, for want both of the instrument of communication and of the needs that make it necessary. His knowledge and skill are confined to jumping, running, fighting, throwing a stone, and climbing a tree. But if he does only these things, he does them far better than we do, having a need of them that we lack; and since they depend solely on bodily exercise and can neither be communicated nor developed from one individual to another, the first man could have been every bit as skilled at them as his latest descendants.\n\nTravelers' accounts abound in examples of the strength and vigor of men among barbarous and savage nations; they praise their dexterity and nimbleness hardly less. And since eyes alone are needed to observe such things, nothing prevents us from believing what eyewitnesses attest on this point. I take a few examples at random from the first books that come to hand.\n\n### Notes, 2\n\n“The Hottentots,” says Kolben, “are more skilled at fishing than the Europeans at the Cape. They are equally adept with net, hook, and spear, in coves and rivers alike. They catch fish with their hands no less skillfully. Their skill at swimming is incomparable. There is something astonishing and entirely their own about their way of swimming. They swim with their bodies upright and their hands held out of the water, so that they appear to be walking on land. In the fiercest turmoil of the sea, when the waves rise like so many mountains, they seem almost to dance upon their backs, rising and falling like a piece of cork.” “The Hottentots,” the same author goes on, “show astonishing skill in hunting, and their fleetness of foot surpasses imagination.” He wonders that they do not more often make bad use of their agility, though they sometimes do, as one may judge from the example he gives: “A Dutch sailor disembarking at the Cape,” he says, “charged a Hottentot with following him into town carrying a roll of tobacco weighing about twenty pounds. When they had both gone some distance from the company, the Hottentot asked the sailor if he could run. ‘Run!’ answered the Dutchman. ‘Yes, very well.’ ‘Let's see,’ replied the African; and, fleeing with the tobacco, he disappeared almost at once. The sailor, dumbfounded by such astonishing speed, did not think of pursuing him and never saw either his tobacco or its carrier again.\n\n“They have such quick sight and so sure a hand that Europeans cannot approach them. At a hundred paces they can strike with a stone a target the size of a half-sol coin; and what is most astonishing is that, instead of fixing their eyes on the target as we do, they keep moving and twisting their bodies. It seems as though an invisible hand carried their stone.” Father du Tertre says of the savages of the Antilles much the same things we have just read about the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope. He praises above all their accuracy in shooting with arrows at birds in flight and fish in the water, which they then catch by diving. The savages of North America are no less celebrated for their strength and dexterity; and here is an example by which to judge those of the Indians of South America. In the year 1746, an Indian from Buenos Aires who had been condemned to the galleys at Cadiz proposed to the governor that he redeem his liberty by risking his life at a public festival. He promised that, alone and with no weapon in his hand but a rope, he would attack the most furious bull, throw it to the ground, seize it with his rope by whatever part they specified, saddle it, bridle it, mount it, and, so mounted, fight two more of the fiercest bulls brought out of the torillo, killing them all, one after another, the moment he was ordered to do so, without anyone's help. His proposal was accepted. The Indian kept his word and succeeded in everything he had promised; for his method and all the details of the fight, one may consult the first duodecimo volume of M. Gautier's Observations on Natural History, from which this account is taken, page 262.\n\nNote 7\n\n“The length of horses' lives,” says M. de Buffon, “is, as in all other species of animals, proportional to the length of time they take to grow. Man, who takes fourteen years to grow, can live six or seven times as long, that is, ninety or a hundred years; the horse, whose growth takes four years, can live six or seven times as long, that is, twenty-five or thirty years. Instances that might contradict this rule are so rare that they should not even be regarded as an exception from which any conclusion could be drawn; and as large horses finish growing sooner than fine-boned horses, they also live less long and are old by the age of fifteen.”\n\nNote 8\n\nI believe I see another difference between carnivorous and fruit-eating animals, one even more general than the difference I noted in the note on page 163, since this one extends even to birds. This difference lies in the number of young, which never exceeds two in each birth among species living only on plants and ordinarily exceeds that number among voracious animals. Nature's design in this regard is easy to discern from the number of teats, which is only two in each female of the first kind, such as the mare, cow, goat, doe, ewe, etc., and is always six or eight among other females, such as the bitch, cat, she-wolf, tigress, etc. The hen, goose, and duck, which are all voracious birds, as are the eagle, hawk, and owl, also lay and brood a great many eggs; this never happens with the dove, the turtledove, or birds that eat nothing but grain, which generally lay and brood only two eggs at a time. The reason one can give for this difference is that animals living only on grasses and plants spend almost the whole day grazing and are obliged to devote much time to feeding themselves; they could not manage to nurse several young, whereas voracious animals, eating almost in an instant, can return more easily and more often to their young and their hunt, and replace so great an expenditure of milk. Many particular observations and reflections could be made on all this; but this is not the place for them, and it is enough for me to have shown here nature's most general system, a system that gives us a further reason to remove man from the class of carnivorous animals and place him among the fruit-eating species.\n\nNote 9\n\nA celebrated author, reckoning up the goods and evils of human life and comparing the two totals, found that the latter far surpassed the former and that, all things considered, life was a rather poor gift to man. His conclusion does not surprise me; he drew all his arguments from the constitution of civil man. Had he gone back as far as natural man, we may judge that he would have found very different results, perceived that man has scarcely any ills except those he has brought upon himself, and vindicated nature. It has taken no little effort for us to make ourselves so unhappy. When on the one hand we consider the immense labors of men, so many sciences deeply studied, so many arts invented, so much strength expended, chasms filled in, mountains leveled, rocks broken apart, rivers made navigable, lands cleared, lakes dug, marshes drained, enormous buildings raised upon the earth, the sea covered with ships and sailors; and when on the other we examine, with a little reflection, the true benefits all this has brought to the happiness of the human species, we cannot fail to be struck by the astounding disproportion between these things and to lament man's blindness: to feed his foolish pride and some vain admiration of himself, he races eagerly after every misery to which he is liable, though beneficent nature had taken care to keep them from him.\n\nMen are wicked; a sad and constant experience spares us the proof. Yet man is naturally good: I believe I have demonstrated it. What, then, could have corrupted him so deeply if not the changes in his constitution, the advances he has made, and the knowledge he has acquired? Let human society be admired as much as anyone likes; it remains no less true that it necessarily leads men to hate one another in proportion as their interests collide, to render one another services in appearance and in fact to inflict every imaginable evil upon one another. What are we to think of dealings in which each person's reason dictates maxims directly contrary to those that public reason preaches to the whole of society, and in which each profits by another's misfortune? Perhaps there is not one prosperous man whose greedy heirs, often his own children, do not secretly wish for his death; not one ship at sea whose wreck would not be good news to some merchant; not one house that a debtor would not wish to see burned down with all the papers it contains; not one people that does not rejoice in the disasters of its neighbors. Thus we find our advantage in harm done to our fellows, and one person's loss is almost always another's prosperity. More dangerous still, public calamities are the expectation and hope of a multitude of individuals. Some want disease, others death, others war, others famine; I have seen dreadful men weep with grief at the prospect of a fertile year, and the great and disastrous fire of London, which cost so many unfortunate people their lives or their property, perhaps made the fortunes of more than ten thousand others. I know that Montaigne censures the Athenian Demades for having punished a workman who sold coffins at very high prices and profited greatly from the death of citizens; but since Montaigne's reason is that everyone would have to be punished, clearly it supports my own arguments. Let us look, then, past our frivolous displays of benevolence into what goes on in the depths of our hearts, and reflect on what must come of an order of things in which all men are compelled to caress and destroy one another, and are born enemies by duty and cheats by interest. If I am told that society is so constituted that every man gains by serving others, I shall answer that this would be excellent if he did not gain even more by harming them. There is no legitimate profit that cannot be surpassed by what can be made illegitimately, and injury to one's neighbor is always more lucrative than service. All that remains, then, is to find ways of securing impunity; to this the powerful devote all their strength and the weak all their cunning.\n\nSavage man, once he has eaten his dinner, is at peace with all nature and a friend to all his fellows. If he sometimes has to fight over his meal, he never comes to blows without first comparing the difficulty of winning with that of finding food elsewhere; and since pride plays no part in the fight, it ends after a few punches. The victor eats, the defeated goes off to seek his fortune, and peace is restored. But with man in society matters are altogether different: first he must provide for necessities, then for superfluities; next come luxuries, then immense riches, then subjects, then slaves. He has not a moment's respite. What is strangest is that the less natural and pressing his needs become, the more his passions increase, and, worse still, his power to satisfy them; so that after long prosperity, after swallowing up vast treasures and laying waste to many men, my hero will end by slaughtering everyone until he is the sole master of the universe. Such, in brief, is the moral picture, if not of human life, at least of the secret aspirations in the heart of every civilized man.\n\nCompare without prejudice the condition of civil man with that of savage man, and examine, if you can, how many new gates to pain and death the former has opened, over and above his wickedness, needs, and miseries. Consider the mental torments that consume us, the violent passions that exhaust and devastate us, the excessive toil heaped upon the poor, the still more dangerous indulgence to which the rich surrender themselves, so that some die from want and others from excess. Think of monstrous mixtures of foods, their harmful seasonings, spoiled provisions, adulterated drugs, the frauds of those who sell them, the mistakes of those who administer them, the poison in the vessels in which they are prepared. Attend to epidemic diseases bred by foul air among crowds of people gathered together; to those brought on by the delicacy of our way of life, by moving back and forth between our houses and the open air, by putting on or taking off clothes with too little care, and by all the precautions that our excessive sensuality has made into necessary habits, neglect or deprivation of which afterward costs us life or health. Add the fires and earthquakes that consume or overturn whole cities and kill their inhabitants by the thousand. In a word, bring together the dangers that all these causes continually gather over our heads, and you will feel how dearly nature makes us pay for disregarding her lessons.\n\n### Notes, 3\n\nI shall not repeat here what I have said elsewhere about war; but I wish that informed people would be willing, or would dare, for once to give the public a detailed account of the horrors committed in armies by the contractors who supply food and hospitals. We would see that their none-too-secret maneuvers, through which even the most splendid armies melt away in no time, kill more soldiers than the enemy's steel cuts down. No less astonishing is a reckoning of the men swallowed by the sea each year, whether through hunger, scurvy, pirates, fire, or shipwreck. Clearly we must also charge established property, and therefore society, with murders, poisonings, highway robberies, and even the punishments for these crimes—punishments necessary to prevent greater evils, but which, by costing two or more lives for the murder of one man, nonetheless actually double the loss to the human species. How many shameful ways there are to prevent human beings from being born and to deceive nature! Whether through those brutal and depraved tastes that insult her most charming work, tastes unknown to savages and animals alike and born in civilized countries only of a corrupted imagination; or through secret abortions, worthy fruits of debauchery and a perverted sense of honor; or through the abandonment or killing of multitudes of children, victims of their parents' poverty or their mothers' barbarous shame; or, finally, through the mutilation of those unfortunates whose part in life and whose entire posterity are sacrificed to empty songs or, worse still, to the brutal jealousy of certain men—a mutilation that in this last case doubly outrages nature, both in the treatment suffered by its victims and in the use to which they are put. What if I were to show the human species attacked at its very source, even in the holiest of all bonds, where people no longer dare heed nature until they have consulted fortune, and where, as civil disorder confuses virtue with vice, continence becomes a criminal precaution and refusing to give life to another human being becomes an act of humanity? But without tearing aside the veil that covers so many horrors, let us be content to indicate the evil for which others must provide a remedy.\n\nAdd to all this the host of unhealthy trades that shorten people's days or ruin their constitutions: work in the mines, the various processes for preparing metals and minerals, especially lead, copper, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, and realgar; and those other perilous trades that daily cost many workers their lives—roofers, carpenters, masons, quarry workers. Bring all these things together, I say, and one may see in the establishment and refinement of societies the causes of the decline of the human species observed by more than one philosopher.\n\nLuxury, impossible to prevent among men greedy for their own comforts and the esteem of others, soon completes the harm that societies began; on the pretext of supporting the poor, whom it ought never to have brought into being, it impoverishes everyone else and sooner or later depopulates the state.\n\nLuxury is a remedy far worse than the evil it claims to cure; or rather, it is itself the worst of all evils in any state, large or small. To feed the crowds of servants and paupers it has created, it crushes and ruins farmer and citizen alike. It is like those scorching south winds which, covering grass and greenery with devouring insects, strip useful animals of their sustenance and carry scarcity and death wherever they blow.\n\nFrom society and the luxury it breeds come the liberal and mechanical arts, commerce, letters, and all these useless things, which make industry flourish, enrich states, and bring them to ruin. The reason for this decline is very simple. It is easy to see that agriculture must by its nature be the least profitable of all the arts, because its produce is the most indispensable to everyone and must therefore be priced within the means of the poorest. From the same principle we may draw this rule: in general, the profitability of the arts is inversely proportional to their usefulness, and those most necessary must in the end become the most neglected. This shows what we should think of the true benefits of industry and the real effects of its progress.\n\nSuch are the visible causes of all the miseries into which wealth ultimately plunges the most admired nations. As industry and the arts spread and flourish, the cultivator, despised, burdened with the taxes needed to sustain luxury, and condemned to spend his life between toil and hunger, abandons his fields to seek in the cities the bread he ought to bring to them. The more the capitals dazzle the people's unseeing eyes, the more we should grieve to see the countryside abandoned, the land lying fallow, and the highways flooded with unhappy citizens turned beggars or thieves, destined one day to end their misery on the breaking wheel or a dungheap. Thus the state, growing rich on one side, grows weak and depopulated on the other; and the most powerful monarchies, after all their labor to make themselves wealthy and deserted, end by falling prey to poor nations that succumb to the fatal temptation to invade them, grow rich and weak in turn, and are themselves finally invaded and destroyed by others.\n\nWould someone please explain to us what could have produced those clouds of barbarians who for so many centuries swept over Europe, Asia, and Africa? Was it to the skill of their arts, the wisdom of their laws, or the excellence of their government that they owed this prodigious population? Let our scholars tell us why these fierce and brutish men, without enlightenment, restraint, or education, far from multiplying to such an extent, did not slaughter one another at every moment in disputes over their pasture or their game. Let them explain how these wretches even had the boldness to look us in the face, accomplished people that we were, with our splendid military discipline, splendid codes, and wise laws. Finally, why, since society has been perfected in northern countries, and so much trouble taken there to teach men their mutual duties and the art of living together pleasantly and peacefully, do we no longer see anything like the multitudes of people those countries once produced? I greatly fear that someone will finally think to answer me that all these great things—the arts, sciences, and laws—were most wisely invented by men as a beneficial plague to prevent the excessive multiplication of the species, lest this world, which is meant for us, at last become too small for its inhabitants.\n\nWhat, then? Must we destroy societies, abolish yours and mine, and go back to living in the forests with the bears? A conclusion in the manner of my adversaries, which I would as soon forestall as leave them the shame of drawing it. You to whom the voice of heaven has not spoken, who recognize no destiny for your species other than to finish this brief life in peace; you who can leave behind in the midst of cities your fatal acquisitions, your restless minds, your corrupted hearts, and your unbridled desires: regain, since it is in your power, your ancient and original innocence. Go into the woods, lose sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries, and do not fear that you debase your species by renouncing its enlightenment in order to renounce its vices. As for men like me, whose passions have forever destroyed their original simplicity, who can no longer live on grass and acorns or do without laws and leaders; those who were honored, in their first father, with supernatural instruction; those who will see, in the intention to give human actions from the outset a moral character they would not have acquired for a long time, the reason for a precept indifferent in itself and inexplicable under any other system; those, in short, who are convinced that the divine voice called all mankind to the enlightenment and happiness of the heavenly intelligences: all such men will strive, through the exercise of virtues they pledge themselves to practice as they learn to know them, to deserve the eternal reward they ought to expect from them. They will respect the sacred bonds of the societies to which they belong; they will love their fellows and serve them with all their power; they will scrupulously obey the laws and the men who make and administer them; they will honor above all the good and wise princes who know how to forestall, cure, or palliate that host of abuses and evils forever ready to overwhelm us. They will stir the zeal of these worthy leaders by showing them, without fear or flattery, the greatness of their task and the strictness of their duty. Yet they will not on that account think any more highly of a constitution that can survive only with the help of so many admirable people, more often wished for than found, and from which, in spite of all their efforts, there always arise more real calamities than apparent advantages.\n\nNote 10\n\nAmong the men we know, whether through our own experience or through historians or travelers, some are black, others white, still others red; some have long hair, others only curly wool; some are almost covered in hair, others lack even a beard. There have been, and perhaps still are, nations of men of gigantic stature; and, leaving aside the fable of the Pygmies, which may well be merely an exaggeration, we know that the Lapps and especially the Greenlanders are considerably shorter than the average man. It is even claimed that whole peoples have tails like quadrupeds; and without placing blind faith in the accounts of Herodotus and Ctesias, we may at least draw from them the very plausible opinion that, if sound observations could have been made in those ancient times when different peoples followed ways of life more divergent than they do today, far more striking variations would also have been noticed in their bodily form and bearing. All these facts, for which indisputable evidence can readily be given, can surprise only those accustomed to looking no farther than what surrounds them, and ignorant of the powerful effects of differences in climate, air, food, ways of life, and habits in general—above all, of the astonishing force of these same causes when they act continually over long sequences of generations. Today, when commerce, travel, and conquest bring different peoples closer together, and frequent contact continually makes their ways of life more alike, we notice that certain national differences have diminished. Everyone can see, for example, that today's French are no longer those tall, fair-haired, fair-skinned people described by the Latin historians, though time, together with the mingling of the Franks and Normans, themselves fair-haired and fair-skinned, ought to have restored to the inhabitants' natural constitution and complexion whatever contact with the Romans may have taken away from the influence of the climate. All these observations on the variations that a thousand causes can produce, and have in fact produced, in the human species make me wonder whether various animals resembling men, taken by travelers for beasts without much examination, either because of certain differences they noticed in their outward form or simply because these animals did not speak, might not in fact be genuine savage men. Their race, long dispersed through the woods, would have had no occasion to develop any of its latent faculties, would have attained no degree of perfection, and would still be in the original state of nature. Let me give an example of what I mean.\n\n“In the kingdom of Congo,” says the translator of the History of Voyages, “one finds many of those large animals called Orang-Outang in the East Indies, which stand, as it were, midway between the human species and baboons. Battel relates that in the forests of Mayomba in the kingdom of Loango, two kinds of monsters are seen, the larger called Pongos and the others Enjokos. The former resemble man exactly, but are much larger and very tall. Though they have human faces, their eyes are deeply set. Their hands, cheeks, and ears are hairless, except for their eyebrows, which are very long. Although the rest of their bodies are fairly hairy, the hair is not very thick, and it is brown. In short, the only part that distinguishes them from men is the leg, which has no calf. They walk upright, holding the hair of their necks with one hand; their retreat is in the woods. They sleep in trees and make themselves a kind of roof there to shelter them from the rain. They eat fruits or wild nuts; they never eat flesh. The Negroes who cross the forests customarily light fires there at night. They observe that when they leave in the morning, the pongos take their places around the fire and do not withdraw until it has gone out: for despite their great dexterity, they lack the sense to keep it burning by bringing wood to it. Sometimes they travel in troops and kill the Negroes who cross the forests. They even attack the elephants that come to graze where they live and harass them so fiercely with blows from fists or sticks that they force them to flee, trumpeting. No pongos are ever taken alive, for they are so strong that ten men would not suffice to restrain one. But the Negroes capture many young ones after killing the mother, to whose body the infant clings tightly. When one of these animals dies, the others cover its body with a heap of branches or foliage. Purchass adds that from his conversations with Battel, he learned from Battel himself that a pongo carried off a little Negro child who spent a whole month in the company of these animals; for they do no harm to people they take by surprise, at least when the people do not look at them, as the little Negro had observed. Battel did not describe the second species of monster.\n\n### Notes, 4\n\nDapper confirms that the kingdom of Congo is full of the animals called orangutans in the Indies, meaning inhabitants of the woods, and Quojas-Morros by Africans. This beast, he says, so resembles a human being that some travelers conceived it might have been born of a woman and an ape—a fancy rejected even by the Africans. One of these animals was brought from Congo to Holland and presented to Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange. It was as tall as a three-year-old child, moderately stout, but squarely built and well proportioned, very agile and lively; its legs were fleshy and strong, the whole front of its body bare, but its back covered with black hair. At first glance its face resembled a human face, but its nose was flat and curved; its ears, too, were human in form; its breast, for it was a female, was plump, its navel sunken, its shoulders well joined, its hands divided into fingers and thumbs, its calves and heels fat and fleshy. It often walked upright on its legs and could lift and carry fairly heavy loads. When it wished to drink, it took the lid of the pot in one hand and held its base in the other. Then it wiped its lips gracefully. It lay down to sleep with its head on a cushion, covering itself so deftly that one might have taken it for a person in bed. The Africans tell strange stories of this animal. They claim not only that it violates women and girls but that it dares attack armed men. In short, it seems very likely to be the satyr of the ancients. Perhaps Merolla speaks only of these animals when he relates that Africans sometimes capture wild men and women in their hunts.\n\nThese species of human-shaped animals are also mentioned in the third volume of the same History of Voyages under the names Beggos and Mandrills; but, confining ourselves to the preceding accounts, we find in the descriptions of these supposed monsters striking resemblances to the human species, and differences smaller than those one might identify between one human being and another. These passages do not disclose the grounds on which their authors refuse the animals in question the name of wild men; but it is easy to conjecture that they do so because of their stupidity, and also because they did not speak. These are weak grounds for anyone who knows that although the organ of speech is natural to man, speech itself is not, and who knows how far perfectibility may have raised civilized man above his original condition. The few lines devoted to these descriptions allow us to judge how poorly the animals were observed and with what prejudices they were viewed. They are called monsters, for instance, yet it is admitted that they reproduce. In one place Battel says that the pongos kill Africans crossing the forests; elsewhere Purchass adds that they do them no harm, even when they catch them unawares, at least if the Africans do not persist in staring at them. The pongos gather around fires lit by Africans after the latter leave, and depart in turn when the fire goes out: that is the fact; here is the observer's commentary: For all their dexterity, they have not enough sense to keep it going by adding wood. I should like to know how Battel, or Purchass his compiler, could tell that the pongos withdrew through stupidity rather than choice. In a climate like Loango's, fire is not very necessary for animals; if Africans light fires, it is less against the cold than to frighten away fierce beasts. It is therefore perfectly natural that after enjoying the flames for a while or warming themselves well, the pongos should tire of remaining in one place and go in search of food, which takes longer to obtain than it would if they ate meat. Besides, we know that most animals, man included, are lazy by nature and avoid every kind of effort not absolutely necessary. Lastly, it seems very strange that pongos renowned for their dexterity and strength, pongos able to bury their dead and build roofs of branches, should be unable to push embers into a fire. I remember seeing an ape perform precisely the maneuver that pongos are alleged to be incapable of performing. It is true that, my thoughts not then being turned in that direction, I made the very mistake I reproach our travelers for making, and failed to examine whether the ape's purpose really was to keep the fire going or merely, as I believe, to imitate a man's action. Be that as it may, it is fully demonstrated that the ape is not a variety of man, not only because it lacks the faculty of speech, but above all because we know for certain that its species lacks the capacity to perfect itself, which is the distinctive characteristic of the human species. Experiments do not seem to have been conducted with sufficient care on the pongo and the orangutan to draw the same conclusion about them. There would, however, be a means by which, if orangutans or others belonged to the human species, even the crudest observers could establish it conclusively; but apart from the fact that a single generation would not suffice for such an experiment, it must be regarded as impracticable, since what is merely a supposition would have to be demonstrated true before the test meant to establish the fact could innocently be undertaken.\n\nHasty judgments, not the fruit of enlightened reason, tend toward extremes. Our travelers blithely make beasts, under the names Pongos, Mandrills, and Orangutans, of the very beings whom the ancients made divinities under the names Satyrs, Fauns, and Sylvans. Perhaps more exact inquiries will reveal that they are men. Meanwhile, it seems to me that there is at least as much reason to trust Merolla on the matter—a learned cleric, an eyewitness, and for all his simplicity a man of intelligence—as the merchant Battel, Dapper, Purchass, and the other compilers. What judgment would such observers, do you suppose, have passed on the child found in 1694 whom I mentioned above, who gave no sign of reason, walked on hands and feet, had no language, and uttered sounds resembling nothing human? It was a long time, continues the same philosopher from whom I take this account, before he could pronounce a few words, and even then he spoke in a barbarous fashion. As soon as he could speak, he was questioned about his first condition, but he remembered no more of it than we remember what befell us in the cradle. If this child had had the misfortune to fall into our travelers' hands, we can hardly doubt that, having noted his silence and stupidity, they would have decided to send him back into the woods or shut him up in a menagerie; afterward they would have written learnedly about him in their splendid accounts as a most curious beast rather like a human being.\n\nFor three or four hundred years the inhabitants of Europe have flooded the other parts of the world and ceaselessly published new collections of travels and reports; yet I am persuaded that the only human beings we know are Europeans. Indeed, to judge by the ridiculous prejudices still alive even among men of letters, almost everyone, under the grand name of the study of man, studies little beyond the people of his own country. Individuals may come and go, but philosophy, it seems, does not travel; and the philosophy of each people is consequently ill suited to another. The reason is plain, at least in distant lands: there are scarcely more than four kinds of men who make long voyages—sailors, merchants, soldiers, and missionaries. One can hardly expect the first three groups to provide good observers; as for the fourth, occupied with the sublime calling that summons them, even if they were not subject, like everyone else, to the prejudices of their profession, we must suppose they would be reluctant to pursue inquiries that seem merely curious and would divert them from the more important labors to which they have devoted themselves. Besides, to preach the Gospel fruitfully requires only zeal, and God provides the rest; but to study human beings requires talents God has promised no one, and which saints do not always possess. Open any book of travels and you will find descriptions of characters and customs; but you are astonished to discover that people who have described so many things have told us only what everyone already knew, that on the far side of the world they perceived only what they could have observed without leaving their own street, and that the true traits distinguishing nations, obvious to eyes trained to see, almost always escaped theirs. Hence that fine moral maxim, repeated to exhaustion by the philosophical rabble: that men are the same everywhere, that since they everywhere have the same passions and vices there is little point in trying to characterize different peoples. This is about as sound as reasoning that one cannot tell Peter from James because both have a nose, a mouth, and eyes.\n\nWill we never see the return of those happy times when people did not presume to philosophize, but when Platos, Thaleses, and Pythagorases, fired by an ardent desire to know, undertook the longest journeys solely to learn, went far away to shake off the yoke of national prejudice, learned to know human beings by their likenesses and differences, and acquired that universal knowledge belonging exclusively to no century or country, but to every time and place, and forming, as it were, the common science of the wise?\n\nPeople admire the magnificence of certain enthusiasts who at great expense have made, or commissioned, journeys to the East with scholars and painters, to draw ruins there and decipher or copy inscriptions. Yet I struggle to understand how, in a century that prides itself on refined knowledge, two men cannot be found closely allied, one rich in money and the other in genius, both loving glory and aspiring to immortality, one willing to devote twenty thousand écus of his wealth and the other ten years of his life to a celebrated voyage around the world: to study there, not always stones and plants, but for once men and their customs; and, after so many centuries spent measuring and inspecting the house, to think at last of getting to know its inhabitants. The academicians who traveled through northern Europe and southern America went there more as geometers than as philosophers. Yet because they were both, the regions seen and described by La Condamine and Maupertuis cannot be considered altogether unknown. Chardin, the jeweler who traveled as Plato did, left nothing more to say about Persia; China appears to have been well observed by the Jesuits. Kempfer gives a passable account of the little he saw of Japan. Except for these accounts, we know nothing of the peoples of the East Indies, visited solely by Europeans keener to fill their purses than their heads. All Africa and its many inhabitants, as distinctive in character as in color, remain to be studied; the whole earth is covered with nations of which we know only the names, and we presume to judge the human race! Imagine a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a Diderot, a Duclos, a d’Alembert, a Condillac, or men of their caliber traveling to instruct their compatriots, observing and describing, with their particular skill, Turkey, Egypt, Barbary, the empire of Morocco, Guinea, the land of the Kaffirs, the African interior and its eastern coasts, the Malabar regions, the Mogul empire, the banks of the Ganges, the kingdoms of Siam, Pegu, and Ava, China, Tartary, and above all Japan; then, in the other hemisphere, Mexico, Peru, Chile, the Magellanic lands, not forgetting the real or supposed Patagonians, Tucuman, Paraguay if possible, Brazil, and finally the Caribbean islands, Florida, and all the wild regions—the most important journey of all, and the one demanding the greatest care. Imagine these new Hercules returning from their memorable travels and then, at their leisure, composing the natural, moral, and political history of what they had seen: we ourselves would see a new world emerge from their pens, and so learn to know our own. I say that when such observers affirm that one such animal is a man and another a beast, we must believe them; but it would be sheer naivety to trust crude travelers in such matters, travelers of whom we might sometimes be tempted to ask the very question they presume to settle about other animals.\n\nNote 11\n\n### Notes, 5\n\nThis seems to me utterly evident, and I cannot conceive where our philosophers find all the passions they attribute to natural man. Apart from physical necessities alone, which nature herself demands, all our other needs become needs only through habit, before which they were not needs, or through our desires, and we do not desire what we cannot know. It follows that, since wild man desires only what he knows and knows only what lies within his power to possess or is easily acquired, nothing should be more tranquil than his soul or more limited than his mind.\n\nNote 12\n\nI find in Locke's Civil Government an objection that seems too plausible for me to be permitted to conceal it. “The end of the association between male and female,” says that philosopher, “being not simply to procreate but to perpetuate the species, this association must last even after procreation, at least as long as is necessary for the nourishment and preservation of their offspring—that is, until the young can provide for their own needs. We see that creatures inferior to man constantly and exactly observe this rule, established by the infinite wisdom of the Creator over the works of his hands. Among animals that live on grass, the association between male and female lasts no longer than each act of copulation, because the mother's milk suffices to nourish the young until they can graze; the male contents himself with begetting them and thereafter concerns himself with neither the female nor the young, to whose sustenance he can contribute nothing. But among beasts of prey the association lasts longer, because the mother cannot adequately provide for her own subsistence and at the same time feed her young by her hunting alone—a more laborious and dangerous means of feeding herself than grazing. The male's help is altogether necessary to support their common family, if that term may be used, which cannot subsist until the young are able to seek prey except through the care of male and female alike. We observe the same in all birds, with the exception of certain domestic birds that live where a constant abundance of food relieves the male of the care of feeding the young; while the young in their nest need food, we see male and female bring it to them until they can fly and provide for themselves.\n\n“And in this, to my mind, lies the principal, if not the sole, reason why male and female in the human species are bound to a longer association than other creatures maintain. The reason is that a woman can conceive and is ordinarily pregnant again and bears another child long before the preceding one can do without its parents' help and provide for its own needs. Thus a father, obliged to care for those he has begotten and to care for them over a long period, is obliged also to continue living in conjugal association with the same woman by whom he had them, and to remain in that association much longer than other creatures, whose young can subsist on their own before the season for another procreation arrives. The bond between male and female then dissolves of itself and each is wholly free until the season that ordinarily prompts animals to come together obliges them to choose new mates. Here we cannot sufficiently admire the Creator's wisdom: having endowed man with qualities suited to providing for the future as well as the present, he willed and arranged for the association of man and woman to last much longer than that of male and female among other creatures, so that the industry of man and woman might be more strongly aroused and their interests more closely united in providing for their children and leaving them property; nothing could be more harmful to children than an uncertain and wandering union, or the easy and frequent dissolution of conjugal association.”\n\nThe same love of truth that led me to set out this objection candidly prompts me to add a few observations, if not to resolve it, at least to clarify it.\n\na. I shall observe first that moral proofs carry little force in physical matters, and serve rather to explain existing facts than to establish that those facts really exist. Yet this is the kind of proof M. Locke employs in the passage I have just quoted; for although it might benefit the human species for the union of man and woman to be permanent, it does not follow that nature established it so. Otherwise one would have to say that nature also instituted civil society, the arts, commerce, and everything else alleged to benefit mankind.\n\nb. I do not know where M. Locke discovered that among beasts of prey the association between male and female lasts longer than among grass-eaters, or that one helps the other feed the young. For we do not see the dog, the cat, the bear, or the wolf recognize its female any better than the horse, the ram, the bull, the stag, or any other quadruped recognizes its own. On the contrary, it seems that if the male's help were necessary for the female to preserve her young, this would be most true of species living solely on grass, since it takes the mother a long time to graze, during which she must neglect her litter; whereas a she-bear's or she-wolf's prey is devoured in an instant, leaving her more time to suckle her young without going hungry. This reasoning is confirmed by an observation on the relative numbers of teats and offspring that distinguishes carnivorous from fruit-eating species, of which I spoke in note 2 on page 167. If that observation is sound and general, the fact that a woman has only two breasts and usually bears only one child at a time gives us still stronger reason to doubt that the human species is naturally carnivorous; so it seems that to draw Locke's conclusion, we would have to reverse his reasoning altogether. The same distinction is no sounder when applied to birds. For who could persuade himself that the union of male and female is more lasting among vultures and ravens than among turtledoves? We have two species of domestic birds, the duck and the pigeon, that provide examples directly contrary to this author's system. The pigeon, which lives on grain alone, remains joined to its female and they feed their young together. The duck, whose voracity is well known, recognizes neither its female nor its young and does nothing to sustain them; and among chickens, a species scarcely less carnivorous, we do not see the rooster troubling himself at all about the brood. If in other species the male shares the care of feeding the young with the female, it is because birds, which at first cannot fly and cannot be suckled by their mother, are far less capable of doing without the father's help than quadrupeds, for whom the mother's milk suffices, at least for a time.\n\nc. There is great uncertainty about the principal fact on which M. Locke's whole argument rests. To know whether, as he maintains, in the pure state of nature a woman is ordinarily pregnant again and bears a new child long before the preceding one can provide for itself, experiments would be needed that Locke assuredly never performed and that no one is in a position to perform. The continual cohabitation of husband and wife presents such an immediate opportunity for another pregnancy that it is very hard to believe that chance encounters or the prompting of temperament alone would produce effects as frequent in the pure state of nature as in conjugal society. Such a slower pace might help make children more robust; it might also be compensated for by a capacity to conceive extending to a later age among women who had made less use of it in their youth. As for children, there are many reasons to believe that their strength and their organs develop later among us than they did in the original condition of which I speak. Their inherited weakness, derived from their parents' constitution; the care taken to swaddle and constrain all their limbs; the softness in which they are raised; perhaps the use of milk other than their mother's—all these impede and delay nature's first advances in them. The attention they are forced to devote to a thousand things on which their minds are constantly fixed, while their bodily strength is given no exercise, may also considerably divert their growth. Thus if, instead of immediately overburdening and exhausting their minds in a thousand ways, we allowed their bodies the constant movement nature seems to demand, we may believe that they would be able to walk, act, and provide for their own needs much sooner.\n\nd. Finally, M. Locke proves at most that a man might have a motive to remain attached to a woman when she has a child; he does not prove in the least that he must have become attached to her before childbirth and during the nine months of pregnancy. If a particular woman is a matter of indifference to a man during those nine months, if she even becomes a stranger to him, why should he help her after childbirth? Why should he help her raise a child he does not even know to be his, whose birth he neither intended nor foresaw? M. Locke plainly assumes the very point at issue: the question is not why a man remains attached to a woman after childbirth, but why he becomes attached to her after conception. His appetite satisfied, the man no longer needs that particular woman, nor the woman that particular man. He has not the least concern, nor perhaps the least notion, of the consequences of his act. One goes one way, the other another; there is little likelihood that after nine months they would remember having known each other, for the sort of memory whereby an individual prefers one individual for the act of generation requires, as I demonstrate in the text, greater progress or corruption of the human understanding than can be supposed in the animal condition under discussion. Another woman can therefore satisfy the man's renewed desires just as readily as one he has already known, and another man can likewise satisfy the woman, assuming she feels the same appetite during pregnancy, which may reasonably be doubted. If in the state of nature a woman no longer feels the passion of love after conceiving a child, the obstacle to association with the man grows greater still, since then she needs neither the man who impregnated her nor any other. There is consequently no reason for the man to seek the same woman, or the woman the same man. Locke's reasoning thus collapses, and all that philosopher's dialectic has not saved him from the mistake made by Hobbes and others. They were meant to explain a fact of the state of nature, that is, a condition in which human beings lived apart and in which one man had no reason to remain beside another, nor perhaps men to remain near one another at all, which is worse; yet they did not think to transport themselves beyond the centuries of society, the times in which men always have a reason to stay near one another, and one man often has reason to stay beside a particular man or woman.\n\nNote 13\n\nI shall take great care not to embark on the philosophical reflections that might be made upon the advantages and disadvantages of the institution of languages; I am not the one permitted to attack common errors, and the learned public holds its prejudices too dear to endure my supposed paradoxes patiently. Let us therefore give the floor to people who have not been treated as criminals for sometimes daring to side with reason against the opinion of the multitude. Nor would anything be lost to the happiness of the human race if, with the plague and confusion of so many languages banished, mortals mastered a single art, and it were possible to explain anything by signs, motions, and gestures. As things now stand, however, the condition of the animals commonly considered brute seems far better in this respect than ours: they express their feelings and thoughts without an interpreter more readily, and perhaps more successfully, than any mortals can, especially when the latter speak a foreign language. Is. Vossius, On the Poetry of Song and the Powers of Rhythm, p.66.\n\nNote 14\n\n### Notes, 6\n\nPlato, showing how necessary ideas of discrete quantity and its relations are even to the humblest arts, rightly mocks the writers of his day who maintained that Palamedes invented numbers at the siege of Troy. As if, says that philosopher, Agamemnon could until then have been ignorant of how many legs he had! Indeed, it is plainly impossible that society and the arts should have advanced as far as they had by the time of the siege of Troy without the use of numbers and calculation; but the need to know numbers before acquiring other knowledge does not make their invention any easier to imagine. Once the names of numbers are known, it is easy to explain their meaning and call up the ideas these names represent; but to invent them, one had, before conceiving those very ideas, to have become familiar, so to speak, with philosophical meditation, to have practiced considering beings by their essence alone and independently of every other perception. This is a most painful, most metaphysical, most unnatural abstraction, without which, nevertheless, those ideas could never have been carried from one species or genus to another, nor numbers have become universal. A wild man could consider his right leg and left leg separately, or regard them together under the indivisible idea of a pair, without ever thinking that he had two; for the representative idea that pictures an object to us is one thing, and the numerical idea that determines it another. Still less could he count to five; although by placing one hand against the other he might have noticed that the fingers matched exactly, he was far from thinking of their numerical equality. He knew the number of his fingers no better than that of his hairs; and if, after someone had explained to him what numbers were, that person had told him that he had as many toes as fingers, he might have been very surprised, on comparing them, to find this true.\n\nNote 15\n\nWe must not confuse amour-propre with amour de soi: two passions very different in their nature and effects. Amour de soi is a natural feeling that impels every animal to care for its own preservation and that, guided in man by reason and tempered by pity, gives rise to humanity and virtue. Amour-propre is merely a relative, artificial feeling born in society, impelling each individual to value himself above everyone else, inspiring all the harm men do one another, and forming the true source of honor.\n\nWith this understood, I say that in our primitive condition, in the true state of nature, amour-propre does not exist. For each man, considering himself the sole spectator observing him, the sole being in the universe interested in him, the sole judge of his own worth, cannot harbor in his soul a feeling that springs from comparisons he is unable to make. For the same reason, this man can feel neither hatred nor desire for revenge, passions that can arise only from the perception that one has suffered an offense; and since it is contempt or the intention to harm, not harm itself, that constitutes an offense, men who know neither how to appraise nor how to compare themselves may do considerable violence to one another whenever it benefits them without ever taking offense at one another. In short, each man, seeing his fellows much as he would see animals of another species, may seize prey from someone weaker or surrender his own to someone stronger, regarding such seizures only as natural events, without the least stir of insolence or resentment, and with no passion beyond the pain or pleasure of failure or success.\n\nNote 16\n\nIt is extraordinarily remarkable that, after so many years spent by Europeans struggling to bring the wild peoples of various parts of the world to their way of life, they have not yet won over a single one, not even with the help of Christianity; for our missionaries sometimes make Christians of them, but never civilized men. Nothing can overcome their invincible reluctance to adopt our customs and live as we do. If these poor wild people are as wretched as we are told, by what inconceivable perversity of judgment do they consistently refuse to become civilized in imitation of us or learn to live happily among us? Meanwhile, one reads in countless places that Frenchmen and other Europeans have voluntarily sought refuge among these nations and passed their entire lives there, unable ever again to abandon so strange a way of life; one even sees sensible missionaries fondly regretting the peaceful and innocent days they spent among these much-despised peoples. If it is answered that such peoples lack the enlightenment to judge their condition and ours soundly, I reply that happiness is judged less by reason than by feeling. Besides, this answer may be turned against us with still greater force, for the distance between our ideas and the frame of mind needed to grasp the pleasure wild people find in their way of life is greater than the distance between their ideas and those that might enable them to grasp ours. Indeed, after a few observations they can readily see that all our labors aim at just two things: comforts in life for ourselves and esteem in the eyes of others. But how can we imagine the kind of pleasure a wild man takes in spending his life alone in the woods or fishing, or in blowing on a wretched flute without ever learning to draw a single note from it and without caring to learn?\n\nWild people have several times been brought to Paris, London, and other cities; people have eagerly displayed our luxury, riches, and all our most useful and ingenious arts to them; none of it has ever stirred in them anything but a blank astonishment, without the least desire to possess it. Among other cases I recall the story of a chief of certain North Americans brought to the English court some thirty years ago. A thousand things were paraded before his eyes in the hope of finding a gift that would please him, but nothing seemed to interest him. Our weapons seemed heavy and awkward to him; our shoes hurt his feet; our clothes hampered him; he rejected everything. At last it was noticed that, having picked up a woolen blanket, he seemed to enjoy wrapping it around his shoulders. “You must admit, at least,” he was promptly told, “that this article is useful?” “Yes,” he replied, “it seems almost as good as an animal skin.” And even that he would not have said had he worn both in the rain.\n\nPerhaps I shall be told that it is habit, attaching each person to his own way of life, that prevents wild people from appreciating what is good in ours. On this view, it must at least seem quite extraordinary that habit has more power to keep wild people fond of their misery than to keep Europeans enjoying their happiness. But to give this last objection an answer against which there is not a word to be said, without citing all the young wild people whom men have tried in vain to civilize, without speaking of the Greenlanders and inhabitants of Iceland whom men tried to rear and feed in Denmark and who all perished of sadness and despair, whether through languishing or in the sea where they had tried to swim home, I shall content myself with citing a single well-attested example, which I submit to the admirers of European civilization for examination.\n\n“All the efforts of the Dutch missionaries at the Cape of Good Hope have never succeeded in converting a single Hottentot. Van der Stel, governor of the Cape, having taken one in as a child, had him raised in the principles of the Christian religion and the practice of European customs. He was richly dressed and taught several languages, and his progress amply repaid the care devoted to his education. Placing great hopes in his intelligence, the governor sent him to the Indies with a commissioner-general, who employed him usefully in the Company's affairs. He returned to the Cape after the commissioner's death. A few days after his return, while visiting some Hottentot relatives, he decided to cast off his European finery and dress himself in a sheepskin. He returned to the fort thus attired, carrying a bundle containing his former clothes, and, presenting them to the governor, made this speech (see the frontispiece): ‘Please take note, sir, that I renounce this attire forever. For the rest of my life I renounce the Christian religion as well; I am resolved to live and die in the religion, manners, and customs of my ancestors. The only favor I ask of you is that you let me keep the necklace and the cutlass I wear. I shall keep them for love of you.’ At once, without waiting for Van der Stel's answer, he slipped away, and was never seen again at the Cape.” History of Voyages, volume 5, p. 175.\n\nNote 17\n\nOne might object that amid such disorder men would have dispersed rather than persistently slaughtering one another, had there been no bounds to their dispersal. But first, those bounds would at least have been the limits of the world; and if we consider the immense population resulting from the state of nature, we shall judge that in that condition the earth would soon have been covered with men, thus forced to remain together. Besides, they would have dispersed if the evil had arisen quickly and the change had come overnight; but they were born under the yoke and were accustomed to bearing it when they felt its weight, content merely to await a chance to throw it off. Lastly, already accustomed to a thousand comforts that compelled them to stay together, they could no longer disperse as easily as in the earliest times, when no one needed anyone but himself, and each went his own way without waiting for another's consent.\n\nNote 18\n\nThe marshal of V—— used to tell how, during one of his campaigns, the outrageous frauds of an army provisioner had caused the troops to suffer and complain, and he sternly rebuked the man and threatened to have him hanged. “That threat does not concern me,” the rogue boldly replied, “and I am pleased to tell you that a man who controls a hundred thousand écus is not hanged.” “I do not know how it happened,” the marshal would add ingenuously, “but indeed he was not hanged, though he deserved it a hundred times over.”\n\nNote 19\n\nDistributive justice would even oppose the rigorous equality of the state of nature, were that equality practicable in civil society; and since all members of the State owe it services proportionate to their talents and strength, citizens in turn ought to be distinguished and favored in proportion to their services. In this sense we must understand a passage of Isocrates in which he praises the early Athenians for knowing how to distinguish which of two kinds of equality was more beneficial: one consists in granting the same benefits indiscriminately to every citizen, the other in distributing them according to each person's merit. These skillful statesmen, the orator adds, rejected the unjust equality that draws no distinction between the wicked and the good, and held steadfastly to the kind that rewards and punishes each according to merit. But in the first place, there has never been a society, however corrupt it may have become, in which no distinction at all was made between wicked and good people. In matters of morals, where law cannot fix a measure precise enough to serve as a rule for a magistrate, it acts most wisely in forbidding him to judge persons and leaving him to judge only actions, lest citizens' fate or standing be left to his discretion. Only customs as pure as those of the ancient Romans could endure censors; similar tribunals would soon throw everything into turmoil among us. It is for public esteem to distinguish the wicked from the good; the magistrate judges only strict right, but the people are the true judge of morals—an upright, and indeed an enlightened, judge in this matter, sometimes misled but never corrupted. The standing of citizens must therefore be determined not by personal merit, which would give the magistrate scope to apply the law almost arbitrarily, but by the real services they render the State, which admit of a more exact assessment.","download_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/discours/translations/trn_discours_mouseia.txt"},{"id":"trn_discours_plain","translator":"Mouseia","kind":"plain","note":"Mouseia’s complete Plain English edition, made independently and directly from the complete French text (dedicatory epistle, preface, both parts and the notes).","text":"### Epistle Dedicatory: To the Republic of Geneva, 1\n\nTo the Republic of Geneva.\n\nMagnificent, highly honored, and sovereign lords,\n\nI am convinced that only a virtuous citizen should pay his country public honors it can accept. For thirty years I have worked to deserve the chance to offer you such a tribute. This happy occasion partly makes up for what my efforts could not achieve, so I thought I could follow the zeal that moves me rather than the right I ought to have. I had the good fortune to be born among you. How could I reflect on the equality nature gave human beings, and on the inequality they created, without thinking of the deep wisdom with which both have been successfully combined in this state? Together, in a way that comes as close as possible to natural law and best serves society, they uphold public order and individual happiness. In looking for the best principles common sense can suggest for forming a government, I was so struck to see all of them put into practice in yours that, even if I had not been born within your walls, I would have felt bound to offer this picture of human society to the people who, it seems to me, enjoy its greatest benefits and have done most to prevent its abuses.\n\nIf I had been able to choose where to be born, I would have chosen a society whose size was limited by the reach of human abilities—that is, by the possibility of governing it well. Everyone would have been equal to the task assigned to them, so nobody would have had to hand over their duties to someone else. In such a state, everyone would know everyone else. Neither the hidden schemes of vice nor the modesty of virtue could escape public view and judgment. The pleasant habit of seeing and knowing one another would make love of country a love of its citizens rather than of its soil.\n\nI would have wanted to be born in a country where the sovereign and the people could have only one and the same interest, so that every part of the machinery of government would always work toward the common good. Since that is possible only when the people and the sovereign are the same body, I would have wanted to be born under a wisely moderated democratic government.\n\nI would have wanted to live and die free. By that I mean subject to the laws so completely that neither I nor anyone else could throw off their honorable yoke. It is a helpful and gentle yoke, which the proudest people wear all the more willingly because they were made to wear no other.\n\nI would therefore have wanted nobody in the state to be able to claim to stand above the law, and no outsider to be able to impose an authority the state was obliged to recognize. Whatever a government's constitution may be, if even one person is not subject to the law, everyone else is necessarily at that person's mercy. And if there is one native leader and another foreign one, however they divide authority between them, both cannot be properly obeyed and the state properly governed.\n\nI would not have wanted to live in a newly founded republic, however good its laws might be. Its government might be organized in a way that did not suit its new citizens at that moment, or its citizens might not suit the new government. I would fear that the state might be shaken and destroyed almost at birth. Freedom is like rich, nourishing food or strong wine: it feeds and strengthens hardy people used to it, but overwhelms, harms, and intoxicates the weak and delicate who are not. Once people have become used to masters, they can no longer do without them. If they try to throw off the yoke, they move even further from freedom. They mistake uncontrolled license, freedom's opposite, for freedom itself, and their revolutions almost always deliver them into the hands of deceivers who only tighten their chains. Even the Roman people, the model for every free people, could not govern themselves when they escaped the oppression of the Tarquins. Degraded by slavery and the humiliating labor the Tarquins had forced on them, they were at first only an unthinking crowd that had to be treated carefully and governed with the greatest wisdom. Only as they gradually grew used to breathing freedom's healthy air could these spirits, weakened—or rather brutalized—by tyranny acquire, step by step, the strict morals and proud courage that eventually made them the most respected of peoples. So I would have looked for a happy, peaceful republic as my homeland, one whose beginnings were almost lost in the distant past. Its only hardships would have been those that revealed and strengthened its people's courage and love of country. Long accustomed to wise independence, its citizens would be not just free but worthy of freedom.\n\nI would have wanted a homeland whose fortunate lack of power kept it from the savage desire for conquest, and whose still more fortunate location protected it from the fear of being conquered by another state. It would be a free city between several peoples, none of whom would gain by invading it, and each of whom would gain by stopping the others from invading it. In short, it would be a republic that did not tempt its neighbors' ambition and could reasonably count on their help if needed. In such a fortunate position, it would have nothing to fear but itself. If its citizens trained in arms, they would do so less because they needed to defend themselves than because training kept alive the fighting spirit and proud courage that fit freedom so well and sustain their love for it.\n\nI would have looked for a country where all citizens shared the right to make laws. Who could know better than they the conditions under which they should live together in one society? But I would not approve of plebiscites like those of the Romans. There the leaders of the state, who had the greatest stake in keeping it alive, were excluded from decisions on which its survival often depended. In an absurd inconsistency, magistrates were denied rights that ordinary citizens enjoyed.\n\nInstead, to stop self-serving, ill-conceived plans and the dangerous innovations that eventually ruined the Athenians, I would have wanted no one to be free to propose new laws on a whim. That right would belong only to the magistrates. Even they would use it with great care, while the people would be equally cautious about giving their consent. Laws could be made public only with such solemnity that, before the constitution was shaken, there would be time to recognize that it is above all a law's great age that makes it sacred and worthy of respect. People soon come to scorn laws they see changed every day. And when they get used to neglecting old customs on the pretext of making improvements, they often introduce great evils to correct smaller ones.\n\nAbove all, I would have avoided a republic that was necessarily badly governed because its people thought they could do without their magistrates, or leave them only uncertain authority, and had unwisely kept control of civil administration and the enforcement of their own laws. Such must have been the crude arrangement of the first governments to emerge directly from the state of nature. It was also one of the faults that ruined the republic of Athens.\n\nI would instead have chosen a republic where individuals were content to approve laws and, acting together on the advice of their leaders, decide the most important public matters. They would establish respected courts and carefully distinguish their various areas of responsibility. Each year they would elect the most capable and upright of their fellow citizens to administer justice and govern the state. The virtue of the magistrates would then show the wisdom of the people, and each would bring honor to the other. If disastrous misunderstandings ever disturbed public harmony, even those times of blindness and error would show moderation, mutual regard, and a shared respect for the laws. These would promise and ensure a sincere, lasting reconciliation.\n\nThese, magnificent, highly honored, and sovereign lords, are the benefits I would have sought in the homeland I chose. If Providence had also given it a charming setting, a mild climate, fertile land, and the most delightful view under heaven, I would have wanted just one more thing to complete my happiness: to enjoy all these blessings in that happy homeland. I would live peacefully and pleasantly among my fellow citizens, show them humanity, friendship, and every virtue, as they would show these to me, and leave behind the honorable memory of a good man and an honest, virtuous patriot.\n\nIf, less fortunate or wise too late, I had been forced to end a sickly, declining life in another climate, regretting in vain the peace and rest that my reckless youth had cost me, I would at least have kept alive in my heart the feelings I could no longer put to use in my country. With a tender, selfless affection for my distant fellow citizens, I would have addressed them from the bottom of my heart in roughly these words:\n\nMy dear fellow citizens, or rather my brothers, since ties of blood as well as law unite almost all of us, I cannot think of you without thinking of all the good things you enjoy. Perhaps none of you knows their value better than I, who have lost them. The more I think about your political and civil condition, the harder it is for me to imagine that human affairs could allow a better one. In every other government, when people try to secure the greatest good of the state, they always get no further than proposals in theory or, at most, mere possibilities. Your happiness is already made; you need only enjoy it. To become completely happy, you need only know how to be content with your happiness. Your sovereignty, won or recovered by the sword and preserved through two centuries of courage and wisdom, is at last fully recognized everywhere. Honorable treaties fix your borders, protect your rights, and secure your peace. Your constitution is excellent, formed by the highest reason and guaranteed by friendly, respected powers. Your state is peaceful; you need fear neither wars nor conquerors. You have no masters but wise laws that you made yourselves and that upright magistrates of your own choosing administer. You are neither rich enough to grow weak through comfort and lose your taste for real happiness and solid virtues amid empty pleasures, nor poor enough to need more outside help than your own work provides. And this precious freedom, which great nations can maintain only through crushing taxes, costs you almost nothing to preserve.\n\n### Epistle Dedicatory: To the Republic of Geneva, 2\n\nMay a republic organized so wisely and successfully endure forever, for the happiness of its citizens and as an example to other peoples! That is the only wish you have left to make, and preserving it is the only task left to you. You no longer need to create your own happiness; your ancestors spared you that work. You need only use it wisely to make it last. Your survival depends on lasting unity, obedience to the laws, and respect for those who administer them. If the slightest trace of bitterness or distrust remains among you, hurry to destroy it. It is a deadly seed from which your misfortunes and the ruin of the state would sooner or later grow. I beg each of you to look deep into your heart and listen to the quiet voice of your conscience. Does anyone among you know a group of magistrates anywhere in the world more upright, more knowledgeable, or more worthy of respect than yours? Do not all its members set you an example of moderation, simple habits, respect for the laws, and the most sincere reconciliation? Give such wise leaders without reservation the healthy trust that reason owes to virtue. Remember that you chose them, that they have justified your choice, and that the honors paid to the people you have raised to office necessarily reflect on you. All of you know that where the laws lose their force and their defenders lose their authority, nobody can have either safety or freedom. So what is at issue among you, except doing willingly and with proper trust what your real interest, your duty, and reason would oblige you to do anyway? Never let a blameworthy and destructive indifference to maintaining the constitution make you ignore, when you need them, the wise advice of your most enlightened and devoted citizens. Let fairness, moderation, and the firmest respect continue to guide all your actions. Show the whole world a people who are proud yet modest, and as protective of their honor as of their freedom. Above all, and this is my last piece of advice, beware of listening to sinister interpretations and poisonous talk. The hidden motives behind such talk are often more dangerous than the actions it discusses. At the first cries of a good, faithful watchdog that barks only when thieves approach, a whole house wakes up and becomes alert. But people hate the nuisance of noisy animals that constantly disturb public peace. Their repeated, ill-timed warnings go unheard even when a warning is needed.\n\nAnd you, magnificent and highly honored lords, worthy and respected magistrates of a free people: allow me to offer you my homage and respect in particular. If there is a position in the world that brings distinction to its holders, it must be one earned by talent and virtue. You have made yourselves worthy of such a position, and your fellow citizens have raised you to it. Their own merit adds new brilliance to yours. You have been chosen to govern by people capable of governing others themselves. I find you as far above other magistrates as a free people, and especially the people you have the honor to lead, stand above the crowds in other states in knowledge and judgment.\n\nLet me give an example of which a better record should remain, and which will always stay in my heart. I cannot recall without the deepest affection the virtuous citizen who gave me life and often spoke to me in childhood about the respect owed to you. I still see him earning his living with his hands while nourishing his mind with the highest truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch, and Grotius among the tools of his trade. Beside him I see a beloved son, gaining far too little from the tender teaching of the best of fathers. The errors of a reckless youth made me forget those wise lessons for a time. But I am happy to learn at last that, however strong a person's inclination toward vice, an education that reaches the heart is unlikely to be lost forever.\n\nSuch, magnificent and highly honored lords, are the citizens and even the ordinary residents born in the state you govern. Such are the informed, sensible people whom other nations think of so poorly and so falsely under the names of workers and common people. I gladly admit that my father was not distinguished among his fellow citizens. He was simply what they all are. Yet there is no country in which decent people would not have sought and valued his company, and benefited from it too. It is not for me to tell you, and thank heaven it is not necessary to tell you, how people of this kind can expect to be treated by you. They are your equals in education, and in the rights that come from nature and birth. They are your inferiors by their own choice, through the preference they owed to your merit and gave it. In return, you owe them a kind of gratitude. It gives me great pleasure to learn how much kindness and consideration you use to soften toward them the seriousness fitting for ministers of the laws. You return in esteem and attention what they owe you in obedience and respect. This is a just and wise practice, well suited to putting further out of mind the memory of unhappy events that must be forgotten if they are never to return. It is all the wiser because these fair and generous people take pleasure in doing their duty. They naturally like to honor you, and those most eager to defend their own rights are the most ready to respect yours.\n\nIt is no surprise that the leaders of a civil society should care about its honor and happiness. What is all too surprising, given how much human peace depends on it, is that those who consider themselves the magistrates—or rather the masters—of a holier and higher homeland should show any love for the earthly homeland that sustains them. How pleasant it is for me to make such a rare exception in our favor, and to count among our best citizens these devoted guardians of sacred teachings recognized by the laws! These respected pastors of souls make the teachings of the Gospel reach people's hearts all the better through their warm, gentle eloquence, because they always practice those teachings first. Everyone knows how successfully the great art of preaching is practiced in Geneva. But people are so used to hearing one thing said and seeing another done that few know how fully the spirit of Christianity, moral purity, strictness toward oneself, and gentleness toward others prevail among our ministers. Perhaps only the city of Geneva can offer the uplifting example of such a perfect union between theologians and men of letters. I base my hope for the state's lasting peace largely on their recognized wisdom and moderation and their devotion to its prosperity. And I note with pleasure, mixed with surprise and respect, how much they hate the dreadful principles of those supposedly holy yet brutal men, of whom history gives more than one example. To defend the supposed rights of God—that is, their own interests—such men were all the readier to spill human blood because they flattered themselves that their own blood would always be spared.\n\nCould I forget the precious half of the republic that makes the other half happy and whose gentleness and wisdom maintain peace and good morals there? Beloved and virtuous women citizens, your sex will always govern ours. How fortunate when your modest power, exercised only within marriage, is felt only for the honor of the state and the public good! That is how women ruled in Sparta, and how you deserve to rule in Geneva. What barbarous man could resist the voice of honor and reason coming from a loving wife? And who would not scorn useless luxury on seeing your simple, modest dress, which gains its beauty from you and seems to show beauty to its best advantage? It is your task to keep alive the love of the laws in the state and harmony among the citizens, through your welcome, harmless influence and your tact. Bring divided families together through happy marriages. Above all, correct, through the gentle persuasion of your advice and the modest grace of your conversation, the faults our young men pick up in other countries. Instead of bringing back the many useful things they could learn there, they return with a childish tone and ridiculous manners acquired among disreputable women, and with admiration for some supposed kinds of greatness. These are trivial consolations for servitude, never worth the dignity of freedom. So always remain what you are: the honorable guardians of morals and the gentle bonds of peace. Keep using every opportunity to put the claims of the heart and of nature in the service of duty and virtue.\n\nI trust that events will prove me right to base my hope for the citizens' shared happiness and the republic's glory on such reliable people. I admit that, with all these advantages, the republic will not shine with the splendor that dazzles most eyes. A childish and ruinous taste for that splendor is the deadliest enemy of happiness and freedom. Let undisciplined young people look elsewhere for easy pleasures and long regrets. Let those who claim to have refined taste admire, in other places, great palaces, beautiful carriages, splendid furniture, lavish shows, and every refinement of comfort and luxury. In Geneva they will find only human beings. Yet such a sight has its own worth, and those who seek it will be at least as worthy as the admirers of everything else.\n\nPlease, magnificent, highly honored, and sovereign lords, receive with equal kindness these respectful signs of how much I care about your shared prosperity. If in this heartfelt outpouring I have unfortunately said anything too boldly, I beg you to forgive the tender affection of a true patriot and the passionate, rightful devotion of a man who can imagine no greater happiness for himself than seeing all of you happy.\n\nI remain with the deepest respect,\n\nmagnificent, highly honored, and sovereign lords,\n\nYour very humble and very obedient servant and fellow citizen,\n\nJ. J. ROUSSEAU.\n\nAt Chambéry, 12 June 1754.\n\n### Preface\n\nPREFACE.\n\nOf all human knowledge, knowledge of human beings seems to me the most useful and the least developed. I would even say that the single inscription on the temple at Delphi gave an instruction more important and harder to follow than all the moralists' thick books. So I regard the subject of this discourse as one of the most interesting questions philosophy can raise and, unfortunately for us, one of the hardest for philosophers to answer. How can we learn where inequality among human beings comes from if we do not first understand human beings themselves? And how can a person see what nature originally made us, through all the changes that time and events must have made to our original makeup? How can we distinguish what belongs to us by nature from what circumstances and our advances have added to or changed in our first condition? Think of the statue of Glaucus. Time, the sea, and storms had so disfigured it that it looked less like a god than a wild animal. In the same way, the human mind has changed within society through a thousand constantly renewed causes: the acquisition of much knowledge and many errors, changes in the makeup of our bodies, and the constant clash of passions. It has, so to speak, changed its appearance until it is almost unrecognizable. Instead of a being always guided by certain, unchanging principles, instead of the heavenly and noble simplicity impressed on it by its maker, we now find only the ugly contrast between passion that thinks it reasons and understanding driven mad.\n\nWhat is even worse is that every advance of the human species takes it further from its original condition. The more new knowledge we gather, the less able we become to gain the most important knowledge of all. In a sense, studying human beings so much has left us unable to understand them.\n\nIt is easy to see that we must look for the first source of the differences between human beings in these successive changes in our makeup. Everyone agrees that by nature human beings are as equal to one another as animals of each species were before various physical causes produced the differences we now observe within some species. It is impossible to imagine that the first changes, however they happened, affected every member of our species at once and in the same way. Some improved or deteriorated, acquiring various good or bad qualities that were not part of their nature, while others remained in their original condition longer. This was the first source of inequality among human beings. It is easier to show this in general than to identify its actual causes precisely.\n\nSo my readers should not imagine that I claim to have seen what I find so difficult to see. I have begun a few lines of reasoning and ventured a few guesses, less in the hope of settling the question than to make it clearer and put it in its proper form. Others will easily be able to go further along the same path, though it will be hard for anyone to reach the end. It is no small task to separate what is original from what is artificial in human nature as it exists today. We need to understand a condition that no longer exists, may never have existed, and probably never will exist, yet we must have accurate ideas about it to judge our present condition properly. Anyone setting out to determine what precautions are needed to make sound observations on this subject would need even more philosophical skill than people think. A good answer to the following problem would be worthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our century: “What experiments would be needed to learn about natural man, and how could those experiments be carried out within society?” Far from attempting to solve the problem, I think I have considered it enough to say in advance that even the greatest philosophers would not be too capable to direct these experiments, and even the most powerful rulers would not be too powerful to conduct them. We can hardly expect such cooperation, especially with the continued effort—or rather the successive contributions of insight and goodwill—required on both sides for success.\n\nThese investigations are so difficult, and so few people have thought of them until now. Yet they are the only means we have left to clear up the many difficulties that keep us from understanding the real foundations of human society. Our ignorance of human nature creates so much uncertainty and confusion about the true definition of natural right. As Mr. Burlamaqui says, the idea of right, and even more the idea of natural right, clearly depends on the nature of human beings. The principles of this field of knowledge must therefore be drawn, he continues, from human nature itself, from our makeup and our condition.\n\nIt is both surprising and disturbing to see how little the various writers on this important subject agree. Among even the most serious authors, one can hardly find two with the same opinion on the matter. Set aside the ancient philosophers, who seem to have made a point of contradicting one another on the most basic principles. Roman legal scholars placed human beings and all other animals equally under the same natural law. They did this because by that term they meant the law nature imposes on itself rather than a law it commands; or, more precisely, because they used the word law in a special sense here, apparently to mean the general relations nature establishes among all living things for their shared preservation. Modern writers, by contrast, recognize as law only a rule laid down for a moral being—that is, one that thinks, is free, and is considered in relation to other beings. They accordingly limit the reach of natural law to the only animal with reason: the human being. But each defines this law in a different way, and they all base it on principles so abstract that even among us very few people can understand them, much less discover them for themselves. All the definitions given by these learned men, despite their constant contradictions, thus agree on just one thing: understanding and therefore obeying the law of nature would be impossible unless one were a very skilled reasoner and a profound student of abstract philosophy. This means, precisely, that human beings must have used, to establish society, knowledge that develops only with great difficulty and among very few people even within society itself.\n\nWe know so little about nature and agree so little on the meaning of the word law that it would be very hard to agree on a good definition of natural law. The definitions found in books are not only inconsistent. They also rely on kinds of knowledge people do not have by nature and on advantages they cannot even imagine until after leaving the state of nature. The writers begin by looking for rules it would be useful for people to agree on for everyone's benefit. Then they call the collection of those rules natural law, with no proof except the benefit they believe would come from everyone following them. That is certainly a very convenient way to make definitions and explain the nature of things through almost arbitrary preferences.\n\nBut until we know natural man, it is pointless to try to determine the law he has received or the law best suited to his makeup. What we can see very clearly about this law is that, to be a law, the person bound by it must be able to submit to it knowingly. And to be natural, it must speak directly through the voice of nature.\n\nSo I put aside all the scientific books, which teach us only to see human beings as they have made themselves, and consider the earliest and simplest workings of the human mind. I think I see there two principles older than reason. One makes us deeply concerned for our own well-being and self-preservation. The other gives us a natural reluctance to see any feeling being, especially one of our own kind, die or suffer. It seems to me that all the rules of natural right arise from the way our minds can bring these two principles together and combine them, with no need to introduce sociability. Later, as reason develops step by step and succeeds in stifling nature, it must establish those same rules again on other foundations.\n\nIn this way there is no need to turn someone into a philosopher before making them a human being. Our duties to others are not taught to us only through the late lessons of wisdom. As long as we do not resist our inner feeling of compassion, we will never harm another human being, or even any feeling being, except when our own survival is at stake and we must rightly put ourselves first. This also settles the old disputes about whether animals are included in natural law. They plainly cannot recognize that law, since they lack understanding and freedom. But their capacity to feel links them in some measure to our nature. We must therefore judge that they too share in natural right, and that human beings have some duties toward them. Indeed, it seems that if I am obliged not to harm another person, that is less because the person can reason than because the person can feel. Since animals and humans share this quality, animals should at least have the right not to be mistreated needlessly by humans.\n\nThis same study of original human beings, their real needs, and the basic principles of their duties is also the only good way to resolve the many problems concerning the origins of moral inequality, the true foundations of the political community, the mutual rights of its members, and a thousand other questions that are as important as they are poorly understood.\n\nLook calmly and without personal interest at human society, and at first it seems to show nothing but the violence of the powerful and the oppression of the weak. We recoil from the cruelty of some or feel driven to pity the blindness of others. Among human beings, nothing is less stable than these outward relations, more often produced by chance than by wisdom, that we call weakness and power, wealth and poverty. So at first sight, human institutions seem built on piles of shifting sand. Only when we examine them closely, brushing aside the dust and sand around the building, do we see the firm foundation on which it stands and learn to respect its base. Without a serious study of human beings, their natural abilities, and the ways these abilities developed step by step, we will never manage to make these distinctions or to separate what divine will has made from what human skill has tried to make in the present state of things. So the political and moral inquiries raised by the important question I am examining are useful in every way. A hypothetical history of governments offers lessons for human beings on every side. By considering what we would have become if left to ourselves, we should learn to praise the one whose generous hand corrected our institutions and gave them a firm foundation. He prevented the disorders they would otherwise have caused and brought about our happiness through the very means that seemed bound to deepen our misery.\n\nWhat God commanded you to be,\n\nAnd what place you occupy in the human world,\n\nLearn.\n\nPers. sat. III, v. 71.\n\n### Part One, 1\n\nDISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS OF INEQUALITY AMONG HUMAN BEINGS.\n\nIt is human beings I must talk about. The very question I am examining tells me I will be speaking to human beings, for nobody raises such questions when they are afraid to honor the truth. So I will confidently defend the cause of humanity before the wise people who invite me to do so. I will be satisfied with myself if I prove worthy of my subject and my judges.\n\nI see two kinds of inequality in the human species. I call one natural or physical inequality because nature establishes it. It consists of differences in age, health, bodily strength, and qualities of mind or character. The other may be called moral or political inequality because it depends on a kind of agreement and is established, or at least approved, by people's consent. It consists of the different advantages some enjoy at others' expense: being richer, more honored, or more powerful than others, or even making others obey them.\n\nIt makes no sense to ask where natural inequality comes from, since the answer is already contained in the definition of the term. It makes even less sense to ask whether the two kinds of inequality have some essential connection. That would be another way of asking whether those who give orders are necessarily better than those who obey, or whether physical or mental strength, wisdom, or virtue always belong to people in proportion to their power or wealth. Perhaps that is a good question for enslaved people to debate within hearing of their masters. But it is not a question for reasonable, free people seeking the truth.\n\nWhat exactly is this Discourse about, then? It is about identifying the point in the course of events when right replaced violence and nature was subjected to law. It is about explaining what extraordinary chain of events could have persuaded the strong to serve the weak and the people to pay for an imagined peace with real happiness.\n\nThe philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the need to go back to the state of nature, but none has reached it. Some readily assumed that human beings in that condition understood justice and injustice, without trying to show why they would have that understanding or even what use it would be to them. Others spoke of everyone's natural right to keep what belongs to them, without explaining what they meant by belonging. Others immediately gave the strongest authority over the weakest, and brought government into existence at once, without considering how much time had to pass before human beings could even understand the words authority and government. Finally, all of them constantly talked about needs, greed, oppression, desires, and pride, transferring to the state of nature ideas they had taken from society. They spoke of wild man but described civil man. Most of our own thinkers never even considered doubting that the state of nature had existed. Yet it is clear from the sacred books that the first man, having received knowledge and instructions directly from God, was not himself in that condition. If we give the writings of Moses the belief every Christian philosopher owes them, we must deny that human beings ever lived in a pure state of nature, even before the flood, unless some extraordinary event caused them to fall back into it. This is a paradox very hard to defend and quite impossible to prove.\n\nLet us begin, then, by setting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on the question. These inquiries should not be taken as historical truths, but only as hypothetical, conditional arguments. They are better suited to explaining the nature of things than to showing their actual origin. They are like the arguments our physicists make every day about how the world was formed. Religion tells us to believe that God himself took human beings out of the state of nature right after creating them, and that they are unequal because he wanted them to be. But religion does not forbid us to make guesses based solely on human nature and the nature of the beings around us about what the human species might have become if left to itself. That is what I have been asked, and what I plan to examine in this Discourse. Since my subject concerns humanity in general, I will try to use language that suits all nations. Or rather, forgetting times and places to think only of the people I am addressing, I will imagine myself in the Lyceum at Athens, repeating my teachers' lessons, with Platos and Xenocrates as my judges and all humanity as my audience.\n\nO human being, wherever you are from and whatever your opinions, listen. Here is your history as I believe I have read it, not in the books of other people, which lie, but in nature, which never lies. Everything that comes from nature will be true; only what I have unknowingly added myself will be false. The times I will describe are very far away. How different you are from what you were! I will, so to speak, describe the life of your species from the qualities you received. Education and habit may have spoiled them but could not destroy them. I know that each person has an age at which they wish they could stop growing older. You will look for the age at which you wish your species could have stopped. You are unhappy with your present condition for reasons that suggest your unfortunate descendants will be still more unhappy. Perhaps you wish you could go back. That feeling should be a tribute to your earliest ancestors, a criticism of your contemporaries, and a source of fear for those unlucky enough to live after you.\n\nPART ONE.\n\nTo judge the natural condition of human beings properly, it is important to look at them from their origin and examine them, so to speak, in the first embryo of the species. Even so, I will not trace the successive stages of their physical development. I will not stop to investigate what they may first have been in the animal world before finally becoming what they are. I will not ask whether, as Aristotle thinks, their long fingernails were originally curved claws; whether they were hairy like bears; or whether, walking on four feet (Note 3), they stared at the ground and could see only a few steps ahead, limiting the nature and scope of their ideas. I could make only vague, almost imaginary guesses about this subject. Comparative anatomy has made too little progress, and naturalists' observations are still too uncertain, for us to build sound arguments on such foundations. So I will not appeal to what we know on this matter through supernatural sources, or consider the changes that must have occurred in people's internal and external physical makeup as they used their limbs in new ways and ate new foods. Instead I will assume that human beings have always been shaped as I see them today: walking on two feet, using their hands as we use ours, looking out over all of nature and measuring the vast sky with their eyes. Strip this being of all the supernatural gifts it may have received and all the artificial abilities it could have gained only through a long process of development. In short, consider it as it must have come from nature's hands. I see an animal weaker than some others and less agile than others, but on the whole more favorably equipped than any of them. I see it eating its fill beneath an oak, drinking from the first stream it finds, and sleeping at the foot of the same tree that provided its meal. Its needs are met.\n\nLeft to its natural fertility (Note 4), the earth is covered with immense forests that no ax has ever cut down. Everywhere it offers supplies and shelter to animals of every kind. Human beings, scattered among them, watch and imitate the animals' skills, and in this way reach the level of their instincts. Each animal species has only its own instinct, while humans, perhaps having none of their own, adopt them all. They eat most of the different foods (Note 5) on which other animals separately depend. As a result, they find food more easily than any other animal can.\n\nFrom childhood, human beings are used to rough weather and harsh seasons and trained to bear fatigue. They must defend their lives and their prey, naked and unarmed, against other wild animals, or outrun them. So they develop strong bodies that can withstand almost anything. Children inherit their fathers' excellent health, and strengthen it through the same activities that produced it. This gives them all the strength the human species can develop. Nature treats them just as the law of Sparta treated citizens' children: it makes those born healthy strong and sturdy and lets all the others die. Our societies are different. By making children a burden to their fathers, the state kills them indiscriminately before they are born.\n\nA wild person's body is the only tool they know, so they use it for many tasks that ours, through lack of exercise, cannot perform. Our inventions take away the strength and agility necessity forces them to develop. If this person had an ax, would their wrist break such sturdy branches? If they had a sling, would they throw a stone so hard by hand? If they had a ladder, would they climb a tree so nimbly? If they had a horse, would they run so fast? Give a civilized person time to gather all their tools around them, and they will certainly overcome a wild person with ease. But if you want to see an even more unequal fight, put the two face to face, naked and unarmed. You will soon see the advantage of always having all your strength at your disposal, always being ready for anything, and, so to speak, always carrying your whole self with you (Note 6).\n\nHobbes claims that humans are naturally fearless and seek only to attack and fight. A famous philosopher thinks the opposite; Cumberland and Puffendorf say so too. According to them, nothing is as timid as a person in the state of nature, who is always trembling and ready to flee at the slightest noise or movement. This may be true of things a person does not know. I have no doubt that unfamiliar sights frighten them whenever they cannot tell whether to expect physical benefit or harm, or compare their strength with the dangers they face. But such circumstances are rare in the state of nature, where everything goes on so regularly and the face of the earth does not undergo the sudden, constant changes caused by the passions and inconstancy of people living together. A wild person lives scattered among animals and early on has occasion to test their strength against them. They soon learn the comparison. Feeling that their skill surpasses the animals' strength by more than the animals' strength surpasses their skill, they stop fearing them. Put a bear or a wolf up against a sturdy, quick, brave wild person—as they all are—armed with stones and a good stick. You will see that the danger is at least equal on both sides. After several such encounters, wild animals, which do not like attacking one another, will be reluctant to attack a human being whom they find just as fierce as themselves. As for animals whose greater strength really does exceed human skill, humans stand in relation to them as other weaker species do, and those species still survive. Humans also have an advantage: they can run just as well as these other species and can find almost certain refuge in trees. So whenever they meet a stronger animal, they can engage or withdraw, choosing whether to flee or fight. Moreover, no animal seems naturally to wage war on humans except in self-defense or extreme hunger. Nor does any animal seem to show toward them the violent hostility that would suggest nature intended one species to be the other's food.\n\nThese are surely the reasons why Black people and wild peoples worry so little about the wild animals they may meet in the woods. The Caribs of Venezuela, among others, live in complete safety in this respect and suffer no trouble from them. Though they are almost naked, says François Corréal, they still boldly go into the woods armed with nothing but bow and arrow. Yet nobody has ever heard of one of them being eaten by wild animals.\n\n### Part One, 2\n\nThere are other, more dangerous enemies against which human beings have fewer ways to defend themselves. These are natural infirmities, childhood, old age, and every kind of disease. They are sad signs of our weakness. The first two are common to all animals, while the last mainly affects people living in society. On the subject of childhood, I also observe that a mother who carries her child everywhere with her can feed it much more easily than the females of many animals can feed their young. Those animals must constantly make exhausting trips back and forth, looking for food on one hand and nursing or feeding their young on the other. It is true that if the woman dies, the child is very likely to die with her. But the same danger faces a hundred other species whose young cannot find food for themselves for a long time. And though childhood lasts longer among us, life also lasts longer, so things are still roughly equal in this respect (Note 7). There are other rules governing the length of early life and the number of offspring (Note 8), but those are not my subject. Old people do little physical activity and perspire little. Their need for food declines along with their ability to obtain it. And because life in the wild keeps gout and rheumatism away from them, and old age is the trouble that human help can do least to relieve, they eventually fade away. No one notices them cease to exist, and they hardly notice it themselves. As for diseases, I will not repeat the empty, false speeches that most healthy people make against medicine. But I will ask whether there is any solid evidence showing that average human life is shorter in countries where medicine is most neglected than in countries where it is practiced most carefully. And how could it be, when we bring more ailments on ourselves than medicine can supply cures for? There is extreme inequality in ways of life: too much idleness for some, too much work for others. We can easily stir up and satisfy our appetites and sensual desires. The rich eat elaborate foods that fill them with heating juices and overwhelm them with indigestion. The poor eat bad food, which they often do not even have; when they get a chance to eat, their lack of it drives them to stuff themselves greedily. Add sleepless nights, excesses of every kind, unrestrained surges of every passion, mental fatigue and exhaustion, and the countless sorrows and troubles people experience in every station of life, which constantly eat away at their souls. These are grim evidence that most of our ailments are our own doing. We would have avoided almost all of them by keeping to the simple, steady, solitary way of life that nature prescribed for us. If nature intended us to be healthy, I would almost dare say that reflection is an unnatural state, and a man who meditates is a corrupted animal. Think of the strong constitution of peoples living in the wild, at least those whom we have not ruined with our strong liquor. They know hardly any diseases except wounds and old age. Knowing that makes it very tempting to believe that the history of human diseases could easily be written by tracing the history of civil societies. That, at least, is Plato’s opinion. He judges from certain remedies used or approved by Podalyre and Macaon at the siege of Troy that various illnesses which those remedies would have aggravated were not yet known among men. And Celsus reports that the diet now so necessary was not invented until Hippocrates.\n\nWith so few sources of illness, a person in the state of nature has little need of remedies, and still less of doctors. In this respect, too, the human species is no worse off than any other. One can easily ask hunters whether they find many sickly animals on their journeys. Many find animals whose serious wounds have healed very well, whose broken bones and even limbs have mended with no surgeon but time and no special diet but their ordinary way of life. They are no less fully recovered for not having been tortured with incisions, poisoned with drugs, or weakened by fasting. Finally, however useful well-administered medicine may be among us, one thing remains certain. If a sick person living in the wild has only nature to hope for when left alone, he has nothing to fear but his illness. That often makes his situation better than ours. So let us not confuse a person living in the wild with the people we see around us. Nature treats all animals left in her care with a special favor that seems to show how fiercely she guards that right. In the forests, horses, cats, bulls, and even donkeys are mostly taller than they are in our homes. All are more robust, vigorous, strong, and courageous. They lose half these advantages when domesticated. It seems that all our efforts to treat and feed them well only make them weaker. The same is true of human beings. When a man becomes sociable and enslaved, he becomes weak, fearful, and servile. His soft and pampered way of life further saps both his strength and his courage. We should add that the difference between one man and another in wild and domestic conditions must be greater still than the difference between one animal and another. Nature has treated humans and other animals equally, but the extra comforts that a man gives himself beyond those he gives the animals he tames are additional, specific causes of his more marked decline.\n\nSo nakedness, the lack of a dwelling, and the absence of all those unnecessary things that we think so essential are not such great misfortunes for these first humans. Above all, they are not such serious obstacles to their survival. If they have no furry skin, they do not need one in hot countries. In cold countries, they soon learn to take the skins of animals they have killed. If they have only two feet to run on, they have two arms to defend themselves and meet their needs. Their children may learn to walk late and with difficulty, but their mothers can carry them easily. Mothers of other species lack this advantage. When pursued, they must either leave their young behind or slow down to match their pace. Finally, unless we assume the unusual, chance combinations of circumstances I will discuss later, which might never have happened at all, one thing is clear in any case. The first person to make clothes or a shelter provided himself with things he did not much need. He had managed without them until then. And there is no reason to think that, as an adult, he could not have endured a way of life he had endured since childhood.\n\nAlone, idle, and always near danger, a person living in the wild must like sleep, but sleep lightly. Animals think little and, one might say, sleep whenever they are not thinking. Since his own survival is almost his only concern, the abilities he exercises most must be those used for attack and defense, whether to overpower his prey or to avoid becoming another animal’s prey. By contrast, the organs developed only through comfort and sensual pleasure must remain rough. That rules out every kind of refinement in him. His senses therefore develop in different ways. His touch and taste are extremely coarse, while his sight, hearing, and smell are exceptionally sharp. This is the condition of animals in general and, according to travelers, of most peoples living in the wild. So we should not be surprised that the Hottentots at the Cape of Good Hope can spot ships on the open sea with their eyes alone from as far away as the Dutch can with telescopes. Nor should we be surprised that the native peoples of America could follow the scent of Spaniards as well as the best dogs could; or that all these peoples bear their nakedness without trouble, sharpen their taste with plenty of hot pepper, and drink European liquors as if they were water.\n\nSo far I have considered only the physical human being. Let us now try to consider the metaphysical and moral side.\n\nIn every animal I see only an ingenious machine. Nature has given it senses so it can keep itself running and, up to a point, protect itself from whatever threatens to destroy or disturb it. I see exactly the same things in the human machine, with one difference. Nature alone directs everything an animal does, while a human being takes part in his own actions as a free agent. One chooses or rejects by instinct, the other through an act of freedom. That is why an animal cannot depart from its prescribed rule, even when doing so would help it, while a human being often departs from his rule to his own harm. A pigeon would starve beside a bowl full of the finest meat, and a cat beside heaps of fruit or grain. Yet either could feed perfectly well on the food it spurns if it thought to try it. In the same way, people given to excesses indulge until they bring on fever and death. Their minds corrupt their senses, and their wills still speak when nature is silent.\n\nEvery animal has ideas, because it has senses. It even combines its ideas to a degree. In this respect, the difference between a human being and an animal is only one of degree. Some philosophers have even maintained that the difference between one man and another is greater than that between one man and a particular animal. It is therefore not so much understanding that sets human beings apart as a species from other animals, but their capacity to act freely. Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. A human being feels the same impulse but recognizes that he is free to yield or resist. It is above all in his awareness of this freedom that the spiritual nature of his soul appears. Physics can explain, to some extent, how the senses work and how ideas form. But the power to will, or rather to choose, and the awareness of that power, are purely spiritual acts. The laws of mechanics explain nothing about them.\n\nEven if the difficulties surrounding all these questions left room to debate this difference between humans and animals, another trait clearly distinguishes them. It cannot be disputed: the capacity for perfectibility. With the help of circumstances, this capacity gradually develops all the others. Among us, it belongs both to the species and to the individual. An animal, by contrast, is after a few months what it will be all its life; its species is after a thousand years what it was in the first year of those thousand years. Why is man alone liable to become mentally helpless? Is it not because he returns in this way to his original condition? An animal has acquired nothing and therefore has nothing to lose. It always retains its instinct. A human being, however, can lose through age or other accidents everything that his perfectibility allowed him to acquire, and so sink even lower than the animal. It would be sad if we had to admit that this distinctive and almost unlimited capacity is the source of all human misfortunes. Over time, it draws man out of his original condition, where he would have spent peaceful, innocent days. Across the centuries it brings out his knowledge and his errors, his vices and his virtues, until at last it makes him a tyrant over himself and over nature (Note 9). It would be dreadful if we had to praise as a benefactor the first person who suggested to a resident of the banks of the Orinoco that he press those boards against his children’s temples. At least they guarantee the children some of their original mental simplicity and happiness.\n\nNature leaves the human being in the wild to instinct alone—or rather, perhaps it makes up for the instinct he lacks by giving him abilities that can first take its place and then raise him far above it. He will therefore begin with purely animal functions (Note 10). Seeing and feeling will be his first state, shared with all animals. Willing and not willing, desiring and fearing, will be the first and almost the only actions of his soul until new circumstances lead to new developments.\n\nWhatever moralists say, human understanding owes a great deal to the passions. Everyone agrees that the passions, in turn, owe a great deal to understanding. Their activity improves our reason. We seek knowledge only because we want enjoyment. It is impossible to see why anyone with neither desires nor fears would bother to reason. The passions, in turn, begin in our needs and develop as our knowledge grows. We can desire or fear things only through ideas we have of them, or through the simple drive of nature. The person living in the wild has no knowledge of any kind, and feels only passions of this last sort. His desires do not go beyond his physical needs (Note 11). The only good things he knows in the universe are food, a female mate, and rest. The only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain, not death. For no animal will ever know what it means to die. Knowledge of death and its terrors was one of the first things human beings acquired as they moved away from the animal condition.\n\n### Part One, 3\n\nIf I needed to, I could easily support this view with facts. I could show that among all the world’s nations, intellectual progress has matched exactly the needs nature gave each people, or the needs circumstances imposed on them, and therefore the passions that drove them to meet those needs. I would show the arts beginning in Egypt and spreading with the floods of the Nile. I would follow their progress among the Greeks. There they sprang up, grew, and rose to the heavens amid the sands and rocks of Attica, yet could not take root on the fertile banks of the Eurotas. I would point out that, in general, northern peoples are more industrious than southern peoples because they have less choice about it. It is as though nature wanted to even things out by giving their minds the fertility she denies their soil.\n\nBut without relying on the uncertain evidence of history, who cannot see that everything seems to keep the human being in the wild from either wanting or being able to leave that condition? His imagination shows him nothing, and his heart asks him for nothing. His modest needs are so easily met close at hand, and he is so far from the level of knowledge needed to want more knowledge, that he can have neither foresight nor curiosity. The sight of nature becomes uninteresting to him because it is so familiar. He always sees the same order and the same cycles. He lacks the presence of mind to wonder at the greatest marvels. In him we will not find the kind of philosophy people need to notice, for once, something they have seen every day. Nothing disturbs his soul. He attends only to the feeling of his present existence, with no idea of the future, however near it may be. His plans, as limited as his outlook, hardly extend to the end of the day. Even today, that is how far the Carib’s foresight goes. He sells his cotton bed in the morning, then comes back in tears that evening to buy it again, having failed to realize that he would need it the following night.\n\nThe more we reflect on this subject, the greater the distance between mere sensation and the simplest knowledge appears. It is impossible to imagine how a man could have crossed such a great gap on his own, without communication or the pressure of necessity. How many centuries might have passed before human beings had a chance to see any fire other than lightning from the sky? How many different accidents did it take for them to learn its most ordinary uses? How many times did they let it go out before learning how to make it again? And how many times, perhaps, did each of these secrets die with its discoverer? What can we say about agriculture? It requires so much work and foresight, depends on other crafts, and clearly cannot be practiced without at least the beginnings of a society. Its purpose is not so much to get food from the earth, which would supply food without it, as to force the earth to produce the kinds we prefer. But suppose human beings had multiplied until nature’s products could no longer feed them. Incidentally, that assumption would show a great advantage for the human species in this way of life. Suppose farming tools had fallen from the sky into the hands of people living in the wild, though they had no forges or workshops. Suppose they had overcome their deep aversion to steady work. Suppose they had learned to anticipate needs so far ahead that they worked out how to cultivate the earth, sow grain, and plant trees. Suppose they had found out how to grind wheat and ferment grapes. These are all things that people had to attribute to instruction from the gods, because they could not imagine learning them on their own. Even after all that, what man would be foolish enough to wear himself out cultivating a field that the first passerby, human or animal, could strip of its harvest if it suited him? How could anyone agree to spend his life at hard work when the more he needed its reward, the more certain he would be not to receive it? In short, how could this situation lead people to cultivate the earth before it was divided among them—that is, before the state of nature was destroyed?\n\nSuppose we wanted to imagine a man in the wild as skilled at thinking as our philosophers make him out to be. Following their example, suppose we made him a philosopher himself, finding the highest truths on his own. Suppose he worked out rules of justice and reason through a chain of highly abstract arguments, drawing them from a love of order in general or from his creator’s known will. In short, suppose we credited his mind with as much intelligence and knowledge as he ought to have, and as much as we actually find him lacking in his dullness and stupidity. What benefit would the species gain from all this metaphysics, which he could not communicate and which would die with its inventor? What progress could the human race make while scattered among the animals in the woods? How far could people improve and teach one another if they had no fixed home and no need of each other, met perhaps barely twice in their lives, and neither knew nor spoke to one another?\n\nThink how many ideas we owe to speech, and how much grammar exercises the mind and makes its work easier. Think of the unimaginable effort and immense time the first invention of languages must have taken. Add these reflections to those above, and you will see how many thousands of centuries it must have taken for the human mind to develop, one by one, the operations it was capable of performing.\n\nLet me consider for a moment the difficulties surrounding the origin of languages. I could simply cite or repeat the research that the Abbé de Condillac has done on this subject. All of it fully supports my view, and it may even have given me the first idea of it. But this philosopher’s way of resolving the difficulties he raises about the origin of established signs shows that he assumes exactly what I call into question: a kind of society already established among the inventors of language. So while I refer the reader to his reflections, I think I must add my own to present the same difficulties in the light appropriate to my subject. The first difficulty is imagining how languages could have become necessary. People had no contact with one another and no need for it. So we can understand neither why they had to invent language nor how they could have invented it, unless it was indispensable. I could say, as many others do, that languages arose in the household dealings of fathers, mothers, and children. But that would not answer the objections. Worse, it would repeat the mistake of those who reason about the state of nature while importing ideas from society. They always imagine the family gathered in one dwelling, its members maintaining the close and lasting bond they have among us, where so many shared interests unite them. In that original state, however, people had no houses, huts, or property of any kind. Each person found a place to stay by chance, often for only one night. Males and females came together by chance, according to their encounters, opportunities, and desires. Speech was hardly needed to tell each other what they wanted to say. They parted just as easily (Note 12). At first the mother nursed her children for her own need. Then habit made them dear to her, and she fed them for their sake. As soon as they were strong enough to look for their own food, they soon left even their mother. And since the only real way to find one another again was to stay in sight, they soon reached the point where they did not even recognize one another. Notice, too, that the child has all its needs to explain and therefore has more to say to its mother than she has to say to it. The child must do most of the work of invention, and the language it uses must be largely its own creation. That produces as many languages as there are people speaking them. Their wandering life adds to this variety, since it gives no language time to become settled. To say that the mother tells the child which words to use to ask her for this or that explains how already formed languages are taught. It does not explain how they are formed.\n\nLet us suppose the first difficulty has been overcome. For a moment let us leap across the vast gap between the pure state of nature and the need for languages. Assuming they were necessary (Note 13), let us ask how they could have begun to take hold. Here is a new difficulty, worse than the first. If people needed speech to learn to think, they needed to know how to think still more in order to invent speech. Even if we understood how vocal sounds became conventional signs of our ideas, we would still need to know how the convention itself could be conveyed in the case of ideas with no object we can sense. Such ideas could be indicated neither by gestures nor by sounds. We can therefore barely form a plausible guess about the birth of this art of communicating thoughts and establishing exchanges between minds. This magnificent art has already moved so far beyond its origins. Yet the philosopher sees it as still so immensely far from perfection that no one could boldly claim it would ever reach that goal. That would remain true even if time’s inevitable changes were suspended to help it, prejudices left the academies or fell silent before them, and the academies could devote themselves to this difficult problem without interruption for centuries.\n\nThe first human language, the most universal and forceful one, and the only one people needed before they had to persuade assembled groups, was the cry of nature. This cry was drawn from them by a kind of instinct only in urgent situations: to call for help in great danger or relief from severe pain. It was not much use in ordinary life, where feelings are more moderate. When people’s ideas began to grow and multiply, and they came into closer contact, they looked for more signs and a wider language. They varied the tone of their voices more and added gestures. Gestures are naturally more expressive, and their meaning depends less on a prior agreement. So they used gestures for visible, moving things and imitative sounds for things heard. But gestures generally indicate only things that are present or easy to describe, and actions that can be seen. They do not work everywhere: darkness or an object in the way makes them useless. They require attention rather than drawing it. Eventually people thought of replacing them with articulated sounds. Those sounds have less natural connection to particular ideas, but they are better able to represent every idea as agreed-upon signs. Such a change could only be made by common consent. It must have been hard to carry out for people whose untrained vocal organs had never practiced it, and harder still to imagine how it happened. Everyone needed a reason to agree, and speech itself seems to have been badly needed to establish the use of speech.\n\nWe should judge that the first words people used had meanings in their minds much broader than the meanings words have in established languages. Not knowing how to divide speech into its component parts, they initially gave each word the meaning of a whole statement. When they began to distinguish subject from attribute and verb from noun—a considerable feat of invention—nouns were at first no more than proper names, and the infinitive was the only verb form. They must have developed the concept of adjectives only with great difficulty. Every adjective is an abstract word, and abstraction is hard work and does not come naturally. At first every object got a name of its own, without reference to kinds or species, which these first inventors could not distinguish. All individuals appeared separate in their minds, as they do in the picture nature presents. If one oak was called A, another oak was called B. Thus the less knowledge they had, the larger their dictionary grew. It was not easy to untangle this mass of names. To group beings under shared, general names, people needed to know their characteristics and differences. They needed observation and definition—in other words, much more natural history and metaphysics than people of that time could have had.\n\n### Part One, 4\n\nBesides, general ideas can enter the mind only with the help of words, and the understanding grasps them only through statements. This is one reason animals cannot form such ideas or ever acquire the perfectibility that depends on them. When a monkey goes without hesitation from one nut to another, do we think it has a general idea of that kind of fruit and compares its model of a nut with those two individual nuts? Certainly not. The sight of one recalls to its memory the sensations it received from the other. What its eyes now perceive tells its sense of taste what it is about to experience. Every general idea is purely intellectual. As soon as imagination has any part in it, the idea becomes particular. Try to picture a tree in general. You will never manage it. Whether you like it or not, you will have to see a small or a large tree, a sparse or leafy one, a light or dark one. If you could see in it only what is found in every tree, the image would no longer look like a tree. Purely abstract beings are seen in the same way, or else can be understood only through words. Only the definition of a triangle gives you its true idea. As soon as you picture one in your mind, it is a particular triangle and not another. You cannot avoid giving its lines a visible form or coloring its surface. So we must make statements; we must speak to have general ideas. For as soon as imagination stops, the mind can go on only with the help of words. If the first inventors could give names only to ideas they already had, then the first nouns could only ever have been proper names.\n\nBut when our new grammarians began, by means I cannot understand, to broaden their ideas and generalize their words, their ignorance must have kept this method within very narrow limits. At first they had made too many names for individuals because they did not know kinds and species. Then they made too few kinds and species because they had not considered all the differences among beings. To make divisions detailed enough, they would have needed more experience and knowledge than they could have had, and more investigation and work than they were willing to do. Even today, we discover new species every day that have escaped all our observations until now. Think how many must have escaped people who judged things by first appearances alone! As for the basic classes and the most general concepts, it hardly needs saying that these too must have escaped them. How, for example, could they have conceived of or understood the words matter, mind, substance, mode, shape, and motion? Even our philosophers, who have used them for so long, struggle to understand them. The ideas attached to these words are purely metaphysical, and the first people found no model for them in nature. I will stop at these first steps. I ask my judges to pause here in their reading and consider this: even after the invention of nouns for physical things, the easiest part of language to discover, how much further would language have to go to express every human thought, take a settled form, be spoken in public, and affect society? I ask them to reflect on how much time and knowledge it took to find numbers (Note 14), abstract words, aorists and every verb tense, particles, syntax, ways to link statements and arguments, and a complete logic of speech. For my part, I am daunted by the growing difficulties. I am convinced that it is almost demonstrably impossible for languages to have arisen and become established through purely human means. I leave anyone who wants to tackle it this hard question: which was more necessary, an already connected society for the founding of languages, or already invented languages for the establishment of society?\n\nWhatever their origins, we can at least see how little nature did to bring human beings together through mutual needs or make speech easy for them. That shows how little she prepared them for social life, and how little she contributed to everything they did to form its ties. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine why, in that original state, one person would need another any more than a monkey or a wolf needs another of its kind. Even supposing that need existed, what would make the other person meet it? And even if the other did, how could the two agree on terms? I know people keep telling us that nothing would have been more miserable than a human being in that state. If it is true, as I believe I have shown, that it would have taken many centuries for him to have either the desire or the opportunity to leave it, that would be a case against nature, not against the person she made that way. But if I understand the word miserable correctly, either it means nothing or it means painful deprivation and suffering of body or mind. I would like someone to explain what kind of misery a free being can suffer when his heart is at peace and his body healthy. I ask which life, in civil society or in nature, is more likely to become unbearable to those who live it. Almost all we see around us are people complaining about their lives. Several even put an end to theirs as far as they are able. The combined force of divine and human law is barely enough to stop this disorder. I ask whether anyone has ever heard of a free person living in the wild so much as thinking of complaining about life or killing himself. Let us be less proud, then, when judging where real misery lies. By contrast, nothing would have been more miserable than a person living in the wild who was dazzled by knowledge, tormented by passions, and thinking about a condition other than his own. It was a very wise act of providence that his potential abilities developed only as opportunities arose to use them. That way they would not be useless and burdensome before their time, or arrive too late to help when needed. Instinct alone gave him everything he needed to live in the state of nature. Developed reason gives him only what he needs to live in society.\n\nAt first it appears that people in this state had no moral relations with one another and knew of no duties. So they could be neither good nor bad, and had neither vices nor virtues. One could use these words in a physical sense, calling traits that can harm an individual’s survival vices and traits that can help it virtues. In that case, the most virtuous person would be the one who least resisted nature’s simple impulses. But let us keep to the ordinary meanings. We should hold off judging this situation and be wary of our prejudices until we have weighed the evidence. Are there more virtues or more vices among civilized people? Do their virtues bring more benefit than their vices bring harm? Does their growing knowledge make up enough for the harm they do one another as they learn what good they ought to do? Or would they be happier, all things considered, if they had neither harm to fear nor good to expect from anyone, rather than accepting universal dependence and having to receive everything from people who have no obligation to give them anything?\n\nAbove all, let us not conclude with Hobbes that, because man has no idea of goodness, he is bad by nature; that he is vicious because he does not know virtue; that he always refuses others help because he does not think he owes it to them; or that his rightful claim to the things he needs makes him foolishly think he alone owns the entire universe. Hobbes saw very clearly what is wrong with every modern definition of natural right. But the conclusions he draws from his own show that he understands it in an equally mistaken way. By his own principles, he should have said that the state of nature is the condition in which caring for our own survival does the least harm to other people’s survival. It is therefore the condition best suited to peace and the human race. He says exactly the opposite because he wrongly includes among the needs of a person living in the wild a multitude of passions produced by society—the very passions that made laws necessary. The wicked man, he says, is a strong child. We still need to ask whether the person living in the wild is a strong child. Even if we granted this, what would follow? Only that if this man were as dependent on others when strong as he was when weak, there would be no limit to his excesses. He would beat his mother when she was too slow to give him her breast, strangle one little brother who bothered him, and bite the leg of another who bumped or disturbed him. But being strong and being dependent are contradictory conditions in the state of nature. A human being is weak while dependent and becomes independent before becoming strong. Hobbes failed to see that the same cause that prevents people living in the wild from using reason, as our legal scholars claim, also prevents them from abusing their abilities, as Hobbes himself claims. We might therefore say that they are not wicked precisely because they do not know what it is to be good. It is not developed knowledge or the restraint of law that keeps them from doing wrong, but calm passions and ignorance of vice: ignorance of vice does more good among them than knowledge of virtue does among us. There is also another principle that Hobbes did not notice. It was given to human beings to soften, in certain circumstances, the ferocity of amour-propre, or the desire to preserve themselves before amour-propre is born (Note 15). It moderates their concern for their own well-being with an inborn reluctance to see another person suffer. I do not think anyone can contradict me if I credit human beings with the one natural virtue that even the strongest critic of human virtues had to recognize. I mean pity. It suits beings as weak and exposed to so many troubles as we are. This virtue is all the more widespread and useful to humans because it comes before any use of reflection. It is so natural that even animals sometimes show clear signs of it. Leaving aside mothers’ tenderness for their young and the dangers they face to protect them, we see every day that horses are reluctant to trample a living body. An animal passes the dead body of one of its kind with unease; some even give their dead a kind of burial. The sad bellowing of cattle as they enter a slaughterhouse shows the effect of the terrible sight before them. It is gratifying to see the author of the Fable of the Bees forced to acknowledge that man is compassionate and sensitive. In his example he abandons his cold, clever style to present a moving picture: a man trapped indoors sees a fierce beast outside snatch a child from its mother’s breast, crush its small limbs in its deadly jaws, and tear its throbbing insides with its claws. How terribly shaken must this witness be by an event in which he has no personal stake! What anguish he feels at the sight, unable to help either the fainting mother or the dying child!\n\nThat is nature’s pure impulse, before any reflection. Such is the power of natural pity that even the most corrupted habits can hardly destroy it. Every day in our theaters we see someone moved to tears by the misfortunes of an unhappy character, though if that same person were in a tyrant’s place, he would add to his enemy’s torments. He is like the bloodthirsty Sylla, so sensitive to suffering he did not cause, or Alexander of Pherae, who dared not watch a tragedy for fear of being seen grieving with Andromache and Priam, while he listened unmoved to the cries of the many citizens slaughtered every day on his orders:\n\nNature admits that she gave the human race the tenderest hearts when she gave us tears.\n\nMandeville understood well that, for all their morality, human beings would only have been monsters if nature had not given them pity to support reason. But he failed to see that all the social virtues he wants to deny them flow from this one quality. What are generosity, mercy, and humanity, after all, if not pity applied to the weak, the guilty, or humankind in general? Benevolence and even friendship are, properly understood, the products of lasting pity directed toward a particular person. What is wanting someone not to suffer, if not wanting that person to be happy? Even if compassion were only a feeling that puts us in the place of someone who suffers—a dim but strong feeling in the person living in the wild, a more developed but weaker one in a civilized person—how would that challenge what I say? It would only strengthen it. Compassion grows stronger the more closely the witnessing animal identifies with the suffering one. Clearly that identification must have been far closer in the state of nature than in the state of reasoning. Reason gives rise to amour-propre, and reflection makes it stronger. Reflection turns a man inward and separates him from anything that troubles or upsets him. Philosophy isolates him. Through it, at the sight of someone suffering, he secretly says, “Die if you want; I am safe.” Only dangers threatening all of society now disturb the philosopher’s peaceful sleep and drive him from his bed. Someone can slaughter another person right beneath his window without consequences for him. He only has to cover his ears and argue with himself a little to stop the part of nature that rebels within him from identifying with the person being murdered. The person living in the wild has no such remarkable talent. Lacking wisdom and reason, he always thoughtlessly gives way to his first feeling of humanity. At riots and fights in the street, the common people gather while the prudent man walks away. It is the rabble, the market women, who pull the fighters apart and prevent respectable people from killing one another.\n\n### Part One, 5\n\nSo it is certain that pity is a natural feeling. By moderating each person's drive for self-preservation, it helps preserve the whole species. Pity makes us help those we see suffering without stopping to think. In the state of nature, it takes the place of laws, customs, and virtue, with the advantage that no one is tempted to disobey its gentle voice. It will keep any strong natural man from taking food that a weak child or disabled old person has struggled to obtain, provided he hopes to find his own food elsewhere. Instead of the lofty rule of reasoned justice, “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” it gives everyone another rule of natural kindness, much less perfect but perhaps more useful: “Do what is good for you while doing as little harm to others as possible.” In short, we should look to this natural feeling, rather than subtle arguments, for the reason every person would be reluctant to do wrong, even apart from the lessons of education. Socrates and people like him may be able to become virtuous through reason. But humanity would have died out long ago if its survival had depended only on its members' reasoning. Their passions were so weak, and this restraint so helpful, that people were rough rather than wicked. They were more concerned to protect themselves from harm than tempted to harm others, and their quarrels were not very dangerous. They had no dealings with one another. So they knew nothing of vanity, standing, esteem, or contempt. They had no idea of yours and mine and no real idea of justice. They saw acts of violence against them as troubles easily put right, not offenses that called for punishment. They did not even think of revenge, except perhaps as an automatic and immediate reaction, like a dog biting a stone thrown at it. Their disputes would rarely have ended in bloodshed if food had been the most sensitive issue. But I see a more dangerous one, which I must now discuss.\n\nAmong the passions that move the human heart is a fierce, headlong one that makes each sex need the other. This terrible passion defies every danger and overturns every obstacle. In its fury it seems capable of destroying the human race, which it is meant to preserve. What will become of people in the grip of this unrestrained, brutal frenzy, without shame or restraint, fighting over their loves every day at the cost of their blood? We must first admit that the stronger passions are, the more laws are needed to contain them. Yet the disorder and crimes these passions cause among us every day show clearly enough that laws are inadequate for the purpose. We should also ask whether these disorders arose along with the laws themselves. If so, even if laws can restrain them, the least we should demand is that they stop a harm that would not exist without them.\n\nLet us begin by distinguishing the moral side of love from its physical side. The physical side is the general desire that draws one sex to the other. The moral side directs that desire and fixes it exclusively on one person, or at least gives it greater force toward the preferred person. Clearly this moral side of love is an artificial feeling. It arose from social life and was praised by women with great skill and care to establish their rule and make the sex that ought to obey the dominant one. This feeling rests on ideas of merit or beauty that a natural man cannot have, and on comparisons he cannot make. So it must be almost nonexistent for him. His mind cannot form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion. Likewise, his heart cannot feel the admiration and love that arise from applying those ideas, even without our noticing it. He responds only to the bodily disposition nature has given him, not to a taste he could not have acquired. Any woman suits him.\n\nConfined to the physical side of love, people are fortunate enough not to know the preferences that inflame desire and make it harder to satisfy. They must feel the heat of physical desire less often and less strongly. Their disputes with one another must therefore be rarer and less cruel. Imagination, which causes so much damage among us, does not speak to natural hearts. Each person peacefully waits for nature's prompting and gives in to it without choosing, with more pleasure than fury. Once the need is satisfied, all desire dies away.\n\nIt is therefore beyond dispute that love, like every other passion, acquired the headlong intensity that so often harms people only in society. It is especially absurd to picture natural people constantly cutting one another's throats to satisfy their lust. That view directly contradicts experience. The Caribs, of all peoples now living the least removed from the state of nature, are precisely the most peaceful in love and the least prone to jealousy, even though they live in a hot climate that seems always to make these passions more active.\n\nSome may draw conclusions from the fights between males of various animal species. These fights bloody our farmyards at all times, or fill our forests with cries in spring as the males compete for females. But we must first set aside every species in which nature has clearly given the sexes a different balance of strength from ours. Thus fights between roosters tell us nothing about the human species. In species where the balance is closer to ours, these fights can only be caused by a shortage of females relative to males, or by exclusive periods when females consistently refuse males. The second amounts to the first: if each female accepts a male for only two months of the year, it is as if the number of females were five sixths smaller in that respect. Neither case applies to humans. Females generally outnumber males among us, and no one has ever observed females, even among natural peoples, having periods of heat and refusal like females of other species. What is more, in several of these animal species all members become excited at once. There comes a terrible moment of shared desire, turmoil, disorder, and fighting. No such moment occurs among humans, whose desire is never seasonal. We cannot conclude from the fights of some animals over females that humans would do the same in the state of nature. Even if we could, these conflicts do not destroy those other species. At the very least, we should suppose they would be no more fatal to ours. It is quite clear they would cause still less damage than they do in society, especially in countries where customs still count for something. There, the jealousy of lovers and the revenge of spouses cause duels, murders, and worse every day. The duty of lifelong fidelity merely creates adultery, while the very laws of chastity and honor necessarily spread sexual misconduct and increase abortions.\n\nLet us conclude, then, that natural man wandered through forests without industry, speech, a home, war, or ties to others. He had no need of other people and no desire to harm them; perhaps he never even recognized any of them as individuals. Subject to few passions and sufficient in himself, he had only the feelings and knowledge suited to that condition. He felt only his real needs, noticed only what he thought it useful to notice, and made no more progress in intelligence than in vanity. If by chance he discovered something, he was even less able to pass it on because he did not even recognize his own children. A skill died with its inventor. There was no education and no progress. Generations multiplied to no purpose, and each began from the same starting point. Centuries passed in all the crudity of the earliest ages. The species was already old, but humanity remained a child.\n\nI have spent so long on the supposition of this original condition because I had to uproot old errors and deep-seated prejudices. I thought I should dig down to their roots and show, in a picture of the true state of nature, how far inequality, even natural inequality, falls short of the reality and influence that our writers claim for it there. Indeed, it is easy to see that several differences between people pass for natural, though they result entirely from habit and the various ways of life people adopt in society. Thus a robust or delicate constitution, and the strength or weakness that follows from it, often owes more to a hard or sheltered upbringing than to the body's original makeup. The same holds for mental abilities. Education not only sets educated minds apart from uneducated ones. It also increases the differences among educated minds as their learning grows. If a giant and a dwarf walk along the same road, every step they each take gives the giant a further advantage. Now compare the enormous variety of upbringings and ways of life among the different ranks of civil society with the simple, uniform life of animals and natural people. There everyone eats the same foods, lives the same way, and does exactly the same things. We can then understand how much smaller the differences between people must be in the state of nature than in society, and how inequality created by institutions must increase natural inequality within the human species.\n\nBut suppose nature really did favor some people with its gifts as much as is claimed. What advantage could the favored gain at others' expense in a condition that allowed almost no relations between them? Where there is no love, what use is beauty? What use is intelligence to people who do not speak, or cunning to people who have no business with one another? I constantly hear that the strong will oppress the weak. But let someone explain what “oppression” means here. Some will rule by force; others will groan in bondage to their every whim. This is exactly what I see among us. But I do not see how it could apply to natural people, who would have a hard time even understanding servitude and domination. One person might seize fruit another has picked, game another has killed, or the cave that served another as shelter. But how could he ever make the other obey? What chains of dependence could exist among people who own nothing? If I am driven from one tree, I need only go to another. If I am tormented in one place, who can stop me from moving elsewhere? Is there a man so much stronger than I am, and also so depraved, lazy, and fierce, that he could force me to provide his food while he stays idle? He would have to resolve never to let me out of his sight for a moment and to keep me securely tied while he sleeps, for fear I might escape or kill him. That is, he would willingly have to take on far more trouble than the trouble he wants to avoid, or than he imposes on me. And after all that, what if his vigilance slips for a moment? What if an unexpected sound makes him turn his head? I take twenty steps into the forest, my bonds are broken, and he never sees me again.\n\nThere is no need to prolong these details. Everyone should see that the bonds of servitude arise only from people's mutual dependence and the shared needs that bring them together. A person cannot be enslaved unless he has first been put in a position where he cannot do without someone else. Since that condition does not exist in the state of nature, everyone there remains free from the yoke, and the rule of the strongest is useless.\n\nI have shown that inequality is barely perceptible in the state of nature and has almost no influence there. I must now show its origin and its progress through the successive developments of the human mind. I have shown that perfectibility, social virtues, and the other capacities natural man possessed only as possibilities could never develop by themselves. Their development required the chance combination of several outside causes that might never have appeared. Without them, he would have stayed in his original condition forever. I must now consider and bring together the various accidents that could have improved human reason while worsening the species, made a being wicked by making him sociable, and finally brought humanity and the world, from such a distant starting point, to where we see them now.\n\nI admit that the events I have to describe could have happened in several ways. I can choose between them only by conjecture. But conjectures become reasons when they are the most likely conclusions we can draw from the nature of things and the only means available for discovering the truth. Moreover, the conclusions I want to draw from my conjectures will not themselves be conjectural. Given the principles I have just established, no other account could be constructed that would not give me the same results and allow me to draw the same conclusions.\n\nThis saves me from dwelling on how the passage of time makes up for the low probability of events; on the surprising power of very slight causes when they operate without pause; and on the fact that some hypotheses cannot be disproved, even if they cannot be given the certainty of established facts. Suppose two events are given as real and need to be linked by a series of intermediate events, unknown or treated as unknown. Where history is available, its task is to supply the events that connect them. Where it is not, philosophy must identify similar events that could connect them. Finally, when it comes to events, similarities reduce the number of distinct kinds of fact far more than one might imagine. I need only offer these matters to my judges for consideration. I need only have arranged things so that ordinary readers do not have to consider them.\n\n### Part Two, 1\n\nPART TWO.\n\nThe first person who fenced off a piece of land, thought to say “This is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and horrors would someone have spared the human race if he had pulled out the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried to his fellows, “Do not listen to this fraud. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and the earth itself to no one!” But things had very likely already reached a point where they could not go on as they were. The idea of property depended on many earlier ideas that could only have arisen one after another. It did not form all at once in the human mind. People had to make many advances, acquire much skill and knowledge, and pass these on and increase them from age to age before they reached this last stage of the state of nature. So let us go further back and try to bring this slow sequence of events and discoveries together in a single view, in their most natural order.\n\nA person's first feeling was that he existed; his first concern was to keep himself alive. The products of the earth supplied everything he needed, and instinct led him to use them. Hunger and other appetites made him experience different ways of existing in turn. One appetite led him to perpetuate his species. This blind urge, without any feeling of the heart, produced a purely animal act. Once the need was satisfied, the two sexes no longer recognized one another. Even a child meant nothing more to its mother as soon as it could manage without her.\n\nSuch was the condition of humanity at its beginning. Such was the life of an animal at first limited to raw sensations, scarcely making use of the gifts nature offered him, much less thinking of wresting anything from it. But difficulties soon arose, and he had to learn to overcome them. Trees were too high for him to reach their fruit. Other animals competed with him for food, and fierce animals threatened his life. All this forced him to develop his body. He had to become agile, fast at running, and strong in a fight. Nature's weapons, branches and stones, were soon at hand. He learned to overcome natural obstacles, fight other animals when necessary, compete even with other people for food, or make up what he had to yield to the stronger person. As humanity spread, hardships multiplied along with people. Differences of terrain, climate, and seasons may have forced changes in their ways of living. Barren years, long harsh winters, and burning summers that consumed everything demanded new skills from them. By the sea and rivers they invented fishing line and hook and became fishers and fish-eaters. In forests they made bows and arrows and became hunters and warriors. In cold countries they covered themselves with the skins of animals they had killed. Thunder, a volcano, or some lucky accident introduced them to fire, a new resource against the harsh winter. They learned to preserve it, then to make it again, and finally to use it to cook the meat they had previously devoured raw. Repeatedly comparing different beings to himself and to one another must naturally have produced in the human mind an awareness of certain relationships. We express these relationships with words like big, small, strong, weak, fast, slow, timid, and bold. Comparing such ideas as the need arose, almost without thinking, eventually gave him some capacity for reflection—or rather an automatic caution that showed him the measures most necessary for his safety.\n\nThe new knowledge produced by this development increased his superiority over other animals by making him aware of it. He practiced setting traps for them and fooled them in a thousand ways. Although several of them were stronger in a fight or faster in a race, in time he mastered some of the animals that could help or harm him and became a scourge to the others. Thus his first look at himself gave rise to his first feeling of pride. He could barely distinguish ranks yet, but he saw his species as occupying first place, and was beginning, far in advance, to claim that place for himself as an individual. His fellow humans were not to him what they are to us, and he had hardly more dealings with them than with other animals. Even so, he did not overlook them in his observations. Over time he noticed similarities between himself, his mate, and other humans. These led him to infer similarities he could not observe. Seeing them all behave as he would have behaved in the same circumstances, he concluded that their ways of thinking and feeling were just like his own. Once this important truth was firmly established in his mind, a sense as reliable and quicker than logical argument led him to follow the rules of conduct toward them that best served his interests and safety.\n\nExperience taught him that the desire for well-being is the only motive of human actions. He could then distinguish the rare occasions when a common interest let him count on help from others, and the still rarer occasions when competition made him wary of them. In the first case he joined them in a group, or at most in a sort of free association that bound no one and lasted only as long as the temporary need that had formed it. In the second, each person sought his own advantage, by open force if he thought he could use it, or by skill and cunning if he felt weaker.\n\nThis is how people could gradually gain a rough idea of mutual commitments and the advantage of keeping them, but only as far as their immediate, visible interest required. Foresight meant nothing to them. Far from worrying about the distant future, they did not even think of tomorrow. If they had to catch a deer, each understood that he should faithfully keep his position. But if a hare came within reach of one of them, he would undoubtedly chase it without a second thought. Having caught his prey, he would care very little that he had cost his companions theirs. It is easy to see that such dealings required a language hardly more refined than that of crows or monkeys, which gather in much the same way. For a long time, inarticulate cries, many gestures, and a few imitative sounds must have made up a universal language. To these each region added some conventional, articulate sounds whose origin, as I have already said, is not easy to explain. This produced separate languages, though rough and imperfect, much like the languages that various natural peoples still have today. I pass over countless centuries as swiftly as an arrow. Time is passing, I have much to say, and progress at the beginning was almost imperceptible: the slower events were in coming, the quicker they are to describe. These first advances at last put people in a position to advance more rapidly. As their minds grew more enlightened, their skills improved. Soon they stopped falling asleep under the first tree or retreating into caves. They devised a kind of axe from hard, sharp stone, and used it to cut wood, dig into the earth, and build huts of branches, which they later thought to coat with clay and mud. This was the time of a first revolution. It established and distinguished families and introduced a kind of property, which may already have given rise to many quarrels and fights. Yet the stronger were probably the first to build homes, since they felt able to defend them. The weaker, we may suppose, found it quicker and safer to imitate them than to try to drive them out. As for those who already had huts, each probably had little interest in taking a neighbor's. This was less because the hut did not belong to him than because it was of no use to him, and he could not take it without facing a fierce fight with the family occupying it.\n\nThe first developments of the heart followed from a new situation that brought husbands and wives, fathers and children, together in a shared dwelling. Living together out of habit gave rise to the tenderest feelings known to people: love between spouses and love for children. Each family became a small society, all the more closely united because mutual affection and freedom were its only bonds. It was then that the first difference in the two sexes' ways of life arose; until then they had lived in the same way. Women became more settled and grew used to looking after the hut and the children, while the man went to find food for them all. A somewhat softer life also began to take away some of the wildness and strength of both sexes. But while each individual became less able to fight wild beasts, it became easier for them to come together and resist the beasts as a group.\n\nIn this new condition, people lived simple, solitary lives. Their needs were very limited, and they had invented tools to meet them. They enjoyed a great deal of free time and used it to acquire various comforts unknown to their parents. This was the first yoke they unknowingly placed on themselves and the first source of harm they prepared for their descendants. The comforts continued to soften their bodies and minds. Habit also robbed these comforts of almost all their pleasure, while turning them into real needs. Losing them became much more painful than having them was pleasant. People were unhappy to lose them but not happy to have them.\n\nHere we can see a little more clearly how speech gradually became established or developed within each family. We can also guess how various particular causes may have spread language and sped its growth by making it more necessary. Great floods or earthquakes surrounded inhabited areas with water or chasms. Changes in the earth cut off pieces of the mainland and made them islands. People brought close together in this way and forced to live with one another would clearly form a common way of speaking sooner than people who wandered freely through mainland forests. So it is quite possible that islanders brought the use of speech among us after their first attempts at navigation. It is at least very likely that society and languages began on islands and developed there before they were known on the mainland.\n\nEverything now begins to change. People who until now wandered through the woods settle in more permanent places. They slowly draw closer, gather into different groups, and eventually form a distinct nation in each region. What unites each nation's customs and character is not regulations or laws, but a shared way of life and food, and the common influence of the climate. Lasting proximity must eventually produce ties between different families. Young men and women live in neighboring huts. The passing contact required by nature soon leads to another connection, just as pleasant and more lasting, through spending time together. People grow used to looking at different things and comparing them. They gradually acquire ideas of merit and beauty that give rise to preferences. Once they are used to seeing one another, they can no longer bear not to. A tender, gentle feeling enters the heart, but the slightest resistance turns it into fierce passion. Jealousy awakens with love. Conflict prevails, and the gentlest passion demands sacrifices of human blood.\n\nAs ideas and feelings follow one another and minds and hearts develop, humanity keeps becoming more accustomed to others. Relationships spread, and bonds grow closer. People grew used to gathering in front of their huts or around a great tree. Singing and dancing, true children of love and leisure, became the amusement—or rather the occupation—of idle men and women assembled together. Each began to look at others and to want others to look at him. Public esteem became something valuable. Whoever sang or danced best, whoever was most beautiful, strongest, most skillful, or most eloquent became the most respected. This was the first step toward inequality and toward vice at the same time. From these first preferences came vanity and contempt on one side, shame and envy on the other. The turmoil stirred up by these new ingredients eventually produced combinations that harmed happiness and innocence.\n\n### Part Two, 2\n\nAs soon as people began to judge one another and formed an idea of the respect due to them, everyone claimed a right to it. No one could deny it to anyone without consequences. This gave rise to the first duties of politeness, even among natural peoples. From then on, every intentional wrong became an insult. Along with the harm done, the injured person saw contempt for himself, often harder to bear than the harm itself. Each punished the contempt shown him in proportion to his opinion of himself. Revenge thus became terrible, and people became bloodthirsty and cruel. This is exactly the stage most natural peoples known to us had reached. Several writers failed to distinguish the stages clearly enough or to notice how far these peoples already were from the first state of nature. They rushed to conclude that humans are cruel by nature and need government to make them gentle. Yet nothing is gentler than a person in the original condition. Nature placed him equally far from the stupidity of animals and the harmful knowledge of civilized people. Instinct and reason alike limited him to protecting himself from the dangers that threatened him. Natural pity kept him from doing harm to anyone, since nothing prompted him to do so, even after he himself had been harmed. For, according to the wise Locke's principle, there can be no injury where there is no property.\n\nBut we must note that the beginnings of society and the relations already established between people called for qualities different from those they possessed in their original makeup. Moral judgments were beginning to enter human actions. Before laws existed, each person alone judged and avenged the wrongs done to him. The goodness suited to the pure state of nature was no longer suited to the emerging society. Punishments had to grow more severe as opportunities to give offense grew more frequent; fear of revenge had to replace the restraint provided by laws. So although people had become less tolerant and natural pity had already weakened somewhat, this stage in the development of human abilities must have been the happiest and most lasting. It held a proper middle position between the inactivity of the original condition and the restless activity of our amour-propre. The more we reflect on it, the more we find that this condition was the least exposed to upheaval and the best for humanity (Note 16). People must have left it only through some disastrous accident that, for the common good, should never have happened. The example of natural peoples, nearly all of whom have been found at this stage, seems to confirm that humanity was meant to remain there forever. This condition is the true youth of the world. All later advances were apparently steps toward the perfection of the individual, but in reality steps toward the decline of the species.\n\nAs long as people were content with their rustic huts, as long as they did no more than sew their clothes of animal skins with thorns or fish bones, decorate themselves with feathers and seashells, paint their bodies in different colors, improve or adorn their bows and arrows, and carve a few fishing canoes or crude musical instruments with sharp stones—in short, as long as they did only work one person could do alone, and practiced only skills that did not require several people to work together—they lived as freely, healthily, kindly, and happily as their nature allowed. They continued to enjoy pleasant relations with one another while remaining independent. But the moment one person needed another's help, the moment people saw the advantage of one person's storing enough food for two, equality disappeared. Property appeared, work became necessary, and vast forests turned into pleasant fields that had to be watered with human sweat. Soon slavery and misery could be seen sprouting and growing alongside the crops.\n\nMetalworking and agriculture were the two skills whose invention caused this great revolution. Poets say gold and silver civilized people and ruined humanity; philosophers say iron and wheat did. Both were unknown to the natural peoples of America, who have therefore remained as they were. Other peoples, too, seem to have remained uncivilized as long as they practiced one of these skills without the other. Perhaps one of the best reasons why Europe became, if not earlier, then more consistently and thoroughly organized than other parts of the world is that it has both the most iron and the most fertile land for wheat.\n\nIt is very difficult to guess how people came to know and use iron. We cannot believe they thought on their own to extract material from a mine and prepare it for melting before knowing what that would produce. On the other hand, the discovery can hardly be attributed to an accidental fire: mines form only in dry places without trees or plants. It is as if nature took precautions to hide this fatal secret from us. That leaves only the extraordinary event of a volcano spewing molten metal, which could have given observers the idea of copying nature's operation. Even then, we must suppose they had great courage and foresight to undertake such difficult work and envision benefits so far off. This hardly suits minds even more developed than theirs must have been.\n\nAs for agriculture, people understood its basic principle long before they practiced it. They were constantly gathering food from trees and plants, and could hardly have failed to notice fairly soon how nature makes plants grow. Yet they probably turned their skills to this use only much later. Perhaps trees, together with hunting and fishing, fed them without needing their care. Perhaps they did not know what wheat could be used for, lacked the tools to grow it, could not plan for future needs, or had no way to stop others from taking the fruits of their labor. Once they grew more skillful, we may suppose that they first used sharp stones and pointed sticks to grow a few vegetables or roots around their huts. This would have been long before they knew how to prepare wheat or had the tools needed to farm on a large scale. Besides, anyone taking up farming and sowing land must accept an initial loss in order to gain much more later. Such caution was far from the way of thinking of natural man, who, as I have said, had trouble even thinking in the morning about what he would need that evening.\n\nThe invention of other skills was therefore needed to make humanity take up agriculture. Once some people were needed to melt and forge iron, others were needed to feed them. As the number of workers increased, fewer hands provided food for everyone, though there were just as many mouths to eat it. Some people needed food in exchange for their iron. Others eventually learned how to use iron to produce more food. Thus plowing and agriculture arose on one side, and the skill of working metals and finding more uses for them on the other.\n\nCultivating land necessarily led to its division, and once property was recognized, the first rules of justice followed. To give each person what is his, each must be able to have something. People also began looking ahead. Everyone saw that he had some possessions to lose, so each had reason to fear retaliation for the wrongs he might do to another. This origin is all the more natural because we cannot understand how the idea of property could first have arisen except through labor. For what can a person put into things he did not make, to claim them as his own, besides his work? Only labor gives the farmer a right to the produce of land he has plowed. That right therefore extends to the land itself, at least until harvest. It extends in the same way year after year, creating a continuous possession that readily turns into property. Grotius says that when the ancients called Ceres a lawgiver and named a festival in her honor the Thesmophoria, they meant that the division of land gave rise to a new kind of right. That is the right of property, distinct from the right that follows from natural law.\n\nThings could have remained equal at this stage if people's abilities had been equal, and if, for example, the use of iron and the consumption of food had always balanced exactly. But nothing maintained that balance, and it was soon broken. The stronger person did more work; the more skillful made better use of his work; the more inventive found ways to shorten the task. The farmer needed more iron, or the smith needed more wheat. Even when they worked equally hard, one gained a great deal while the other barely got by. Thus natural inequality gradually unfolds along with inequality produced by social arrangements. Differences between people are developed by differences in their circumstances. Their effects become more noticeable and more lasting, and increasingly shape the fortunes of individuals.\n\nOnce matters reached this point, it is easy to imagine the rest. I will not stop to describe the successive invention of other skills, the progress of languages, the testing and use of talents, unequal fortunes, the use or abuse of wealth, or all the details that follow from these and that anyone can easily supply. I will only take a brief look at humanity in this new order of things.\n\nNow all our abilities have developed. Memory and imagination are at work, amour-propre has a stake in things, reason has become active, and the mind has almost reached the limit of its possible perfection. All natural qualities have come into play. Each person's rank and fortune now depend not only on how much property he has and his power to help or harm, but also on intelligence, beauty, strength, skill, merit, or talent. Since these qualities alone could win respect, people soon had to possess them or pretend to. For their own benefit, they had to show themselves as different from what they really were. Being and appearing became entirely different things. From this division came showy display, deceitful cunning, and all the vices that come with them. On the other hand, the person who had once been free and independent was now subject, so to speak, to all of nature through a host of new needs. Above all he was subject to other people, becoming in a sense their slave even when he became their master. If he was rich, he needed their services; if poor, he needed their help. Having a modest amount did not let him do without them. He had to keep trying to interest them in his fate, making them see a real or apparent benefit in working for his benefit. This made him dishonest and manipulative with some, domineering and harsh with others. He had to exploit everyone he needed whenever he could not make them fear him and had nothing to gain by genuinely helping them. Finally, consuming ambition and the urge to improve one's position relative to others, not so much out of real need as to put oneself above them, gave everyone a dark inclination to harm one another. Secret jealousy grew all the more dangerous because it often disguised itself as kindness to make its strike safer. In short, competition and rivalry on one side, opposed interests on the other, and always the hidden wish to profit at another's expense: all these evils were the first effects of property and the constant companions of emerging inequality.\n\nBefore people invented symbols that represented wealth, it could scarcely consist of anything besides land and livestock, the only real goods they could possess. But when landholdings had grown in number and size until they covered the whole ground and touched one another, some could expand only at the expense of others. Those left without land, whom weakness or idleness had kept from acquiring it in turn, became poor without having lost anything. Everything around them had changed, while they alone had not. They had to get their food from the rich, either by receiving it or by seizing it. Depending on people's different characters, domination and servitude, or violence and theft, began to arise from this situation. The rich, for their part, had scarcely tasted the pleasure of ruling before they looked down on every other pleasure. They used their former slaves to subdue new ones and thought only of conquering and enslaving their neighbors. They were like hungry wolves that, once they have tasted human flesh, reject every other food and want nothing but to devour people.\n\n### Part Two, 3\n\nThat is how the most powerful and the most destitute came to treat their strength or their need as a kind of right to other people's goods, equal, in their eyes, to the right of property. Once equality was broken, the most dreadful disorder followed. The rich seized what they wanted, the poor stole, and everyone's unchecked passions stifled natural pity and the still faint voice of justice. People became greedy, ambitious, and cruel. The right of the strongest and the right of the first occupant came into constant conflict. Only fighting and killing settled it (Note 17). The society that was just emerging gave way to the most terrible state of war. Humanity was degraded and devastated. It could not go back or give up the unfortunate gains it had made. By misusing the very abilities that gave it distinction, it worked only toward its own disgrace and brought itself to the brink of destruction.\n\nStunned by this new evil, rich and poor alike\nWish to escape wealth and hate what they had just prayed for.\n\nPeople must finally have thought about their wretched situation and the calamities that overwhelmed them. The rich in particular must soon have realized how much a perpetual war hurt them. They alone paid its full costs: everyone risked their life, but only they risked their property. Whatever excuse they offered for what they had taken, they knew that their claim rested on an insecure and wrongful right. They had acquired their possessions by force, and force could take them away again, leaving them no grounds for complaint. Even those whose own work had made them rich could hardly claim a better title to their property. They could say, “I built this wall. I earned this land by working it.” But someone could answer: “Who gave you the boundary lines? On what grounds do you expect us to pay for work we never asked you to do? Don't you know that many of your fellow human beings are dying or suffering for lack of what you have in excess? To take for yourself from our common means of subsistence anything beyond what you need, you would have required the express, unanimous consent of the whole human race.” The rich man had no sound argument to justify himself and not enough strength to defend himself. He could easily crush one person but would himself be crushed by bands of robbers. He stood alone against everyone else. Mutual jealousy kept him from joining with his equals against enemies united by the shared hope of plunder. Necessity finally led him to the most carefully considered plan ever conceived by the human mind: to turn the very forces attacking him to his own advantage. He would make his opponents his defenders, teach them new principles, and give them institutions as favorable to him as natural right was hostile to him.\n\nWith this aim, he described to his neighbors how terrible their situation was. It armed each against all the others, made their possessions as burdensome as their needs, and gave no one safety in poverty or wealth. He easily came up with convincing-sounding reasons to win them over. “Let us unite,” he told them, “to protect the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitious, and secure each person's possession of what belongs to them. Let us establish rules of justice and peace that everyone must follow. They must favor no one, and they must, to some extent, correct the whims of fortune by putting the powerful and the weak under the same mutual duties. In short, instead of turning our strength against one another, let us combine it in a supreme power. Let it govern us by wise laws, protect and defend every member of our association, repel our common enemies, and keep us in lasting harmony.”\n\nIt took much less than a speech like this to persuade unsophisticated people who were easily misled. They had too many disputes among themselves to do without arbitrators and too much greed and ambition to do without masters for long. They all rushed to accept their chains, thinking they were securing their freedom. They had enough sense to recognize the benefits of a political system, but not enough experience to foresee its dangers. The people best able to anticipate abuses were precisely those who hoped to profit from them. Even wise people saw that they had to sacrifice some of their freedom to preserve the rest, as an injured person has an arm cut off to save the rest of the body. This was, or must have been, the origin of society and laws. They put new restraints on the weak and gave new strength to the rich (Note 18). They destroyed natural freedom for good, permanently established the law of property and inequality, turned a clever seizure into an irrevocable right, and, for the profit of a few ambitious people, subjected the whole human race from then on to labor, servitude, and misery. It is easy to see how the establishment of one society made all the others necessary: people had to unite in turn to face united forces. Societies quickly multiplied or expanded until they covered the entire earth. No corner of the world remained where a person could escape the yoke or withdraw their head from the often badly handled sword that everyone saw hanging over it all the time. Civil law thus became the common rule for citizens. The law of nature remained in force only between different societies. There it was called the law of nations and was softened by a few unspoken agreements that made dealings possible. These agreements made up for natural compassion, which had lost almost all its strength between societies, though it once operated between individuals. That compassion now survives only in a few great cosmopolitan souls. They cross the imaginary boundaries that divide peoples and, like the supreme being who created them, embrace the whole human race in their goodwill.\n\nPolitical communities remained in the state of nature in relation to one another. They soon felt the same difficulties that had forced individuals out of that state, and among these large bodies it became still more disastrous than it had been among the people who made them up. This gave rise to wars between nations, battles, killings, and reprisals that make nature shudder and offend reason. It also gave rise to all those horrible prejudices that treat the honor of shedding human blood as a virtue. Even the most decent people learned to count slaughtering others among their duties. At last people were massacring one another by the thousands without knowing why. More people were killed in a single day of battle, and more horrors committed when one city was taken, than had occurred across the whole earth during entire centuries in the state of nature. These are the first effects we can see of humanity's division into different societies. Let us return to how those societies were established.\n\nI know that several writers have proposed other origins for political societies, including conquest by the most powerful and union among the weak. My argument does not depend on choosing among these causes. Still, the origin I have described seems to me the most natural, for the following reasons. 1. In the first case, the right of conquest is no right at all, so it cannot establish any other right. Conquerors and conquered peoples remain in a state of war with one another unless a nation, restored to full freedom, voluntarily chooses its conqueror as its leader. Until then, whatever terms of surrender may have been agreed, they were based on violence and are therefore void by their very nature. On this account, there can be no real society, no political body, and no law except the law of the strongest. 2. In the second case, the words “strong” and “weak” are ambiguous. For the period between the establishment of the right of property or first occupancy and the establishment of political governments, “poor” and “rich” express the distinction better. Before there were laws, a person could bring equals under their control only by attacking their property or giving them a share of their own. 3. The poor had nothing to lose but their freedom. It would have been sheer folly for them to surrender voluntarily the only good they still possessed and gain nothing in return. The rich, by contrast, could be hurt, so to speak, in every part of their property. It was far easier to do them harm, so they had more precautions to take against it. Finally, it is reasonable to think that an institution was invented by those who benefit from it rather than those it harms.\n\nAt first, government had no settled, orderly form. With little understanding or experience, people saw only the immediate problems. They thought of remedies for other problems only as they arose. Despite all the efforts of the wisest lawmakers, the political state remained imperfect. It was largely a product of chance. Because it had started badly, time could expose its faults and suggest remedies but could never repair the flaws in its structure. People kept patching it up when they should first have cleared the ground and removed all the old materials, as Lycurgus did at Sparta, before putting up a sound building. At first society consisted only of a few general agreements. All individuals pledged to follow them, and the community guaranteed them to each person. Experience had to show how weak such an arrangement was and how easily offenders could escape being found guilty or punished when only the public could witness and judge their offenses. The law had to be evaded in countless ways. Problems and disorders had to keep multiplying before people finally thought of placing the dangerous trust of public authority in the hands of particular individuals and assigning magistrates the task of enforcing the people's decisions. To say that leaders were chosen before the confederation was formed, and that officers of the laws existed before the laws themselves, is an assumption not worth seriously debating.\n\nIt would be no more reasonable to believe that people immediately threw themselves into the arms of an absolute master, without conditions and without any way back. Proud, untamed people could hardly have imagined that the first way to provide for common safety was to plunge into slavery. Why, after all, did they give themselves superiors if not to defend them from oppression and protect their possessions, their freedoms, and their lives—the very elements, so to speak, of their existence? Between one person and another, the worst thing that can happen to someone is to be at the other's mercy. Would it not have been absurd to begin by handing a leader the very things they needed his help to preserve? What could he have offered them in exchange for surrendering so valuable a right? If he had dared to demand it on the pretext of defending them, wouldn't they immediately have answered as in the fable: “What worse could the enemy do to us?” It is therefore beyond dispute, and a basic principle of all political right, that peoples appoint leaders to defend their freedom, not to enslave them. “If we have a prince,” Pliny said to Trajan, “it is so that he will keep us from having a master.”\n\nPolitical thinkers make the same flawed arguments about love of freedom that philosophers have made about the state of nature. They judge very different things they have never seen by the things they see. They take the patience with which people around them bear servitude as evidence that humans naturally tend toward it. They forget that freedom is like innocence and virtue. Only those who enjoy it know its value, and once it is lost, so is the taste for it. “I know the delights of your country,” Brasidas said to a satrap who compared life in Sparta with life in Persepolis, “but you cannot know the pleasures of mine.”\n\nAn untamed horse bristles its mane, stamps the ground, and struggles fiercely at the mere approach of a bit, while a trained horse patiently endures the whip and spur. In the same way, a person outside civilization will not bow to the yoke that a civilized person carries without complaint. The first prefers even the most turbulent freedom to quiet subjection. We should judge the natural human response to servitude, for or against it, not from the degradation of enslaved peoples but from the extraordinary things free peoples have done to protect themselves against oppression. I know that the first group constantly praises the peace and rest it enjoys in chains, and that “they call the most wretched slavery peace.” But when I see others sacrifice pleasure, rest, wealth, power, and even life to preserve this one good so scorned by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and hating captivity smash their heads against the bars of their cages; when I see crowds of naked people living outside civilization reject European luxuries and face hunger, fire, steel, and death just to keep their independence, I know it is not for slaves to theorize about freedom.\n\n### Part Two, 4\n\nSome have claimed that absolute government and all society arose from a father's authority. Without even turning to the contrary arguments of Locke and Sidney, it is enough to observe that nothing could be further from the savage spirit of despotism than this authority's gentle character. It looks more to the welfare of the person obeying than to the benefit of the person commanding. Under the law of nature, a father has authority over his child only as long as the child needs his help. After that they become equals, and the son, entirely independent of his father, owes him respect, not obedience. Gratitude is a duty to be paid, not a right that can be demanded. Instead of saying that civil society comes from paternal power, we should say that paternal power gets its main strength from civil society. One person was recognized as the father of several children only when they remained together around him. The father's possessions, which he really does control, are the ties that keep his children dependent on him. He can give them a share of his estate only in proportion to the respect they have shown by constantly yielding to his wishes. Subjects can expect no such favor from a despot. He claims to own them and all they possess. They are reduced to treating whatever portion of their own property he lets them keep as a favor. He does justice when he strips them of their possessions; he shows mercy when he lets them live.\n\nIf we keep testing the facts against what is right, we will find no more soundness than truth in the idea that tyranny was established voluntarily. It would be hard to show that a contract is valid if it binds only one party, puts everything on one side and nothing on the other, and harms only the person undertaking the obligation. This hateful system is far from being the system even today of wise and good monarchs, especially the kings of France. We can see this in various passages of their edicts, and particularly in the following passage from a famous work published in 1667 in the name and by the orders of Louis XIV: “So let no one say that a sovereign is not subject to the laws of his State. The opposite proposition is a truth of the law of nations that flattery has sometimes attacked, but good princes have always defended it as the guardian spirit of their States. How much more proper it is to say, with the wise Plato, that a kingdom is perfectly happy when the subjects obey the prince, the prince obeys the law, and the law is just and always directed toward the public good.” I will not stop to consider whether freedom is the noblest of human abilities, and whether giving up, without reservation, this most precious of all our gifts degrades our nature, lowers us to the level of animals enslaved by instinct, and even offends the author of our existence. Nor will I ask whether submitting to the commission of every crime he forbids us, just to please a savage or senseless master, would anger this sublime maker more than seeing his finest work destroyed rather than dishonored. I will ask only this: by what right could people unafraid to degrade themselves so far subject their descendants to the same disgrace? How could they surrender on their descendants' behalf gifts those descendants did not receive from their generosity, gifts without which life itself is a burden to anyone worthy of them?\n\nPufendorf says that, just as we transfer our property to someone else through agreements and contracts, we can also surrender our freedom for someone else's benefit. This seems to me a very poor argument. First, property I give away becomes completely foreign to me, and I have no stake in how it is misused. But I do have a stake in whether my freedom is misused. I cannot expose myself to becoming an instrument of crime without making myself responsible for the evil I will be forced to do. Moreover, the right of property rests only on agreement and human institutions, so each person may dispose of what they own as they please. The same is not true of nature's essential gifts, such as life and freedom. Everyone is entitled to enjoy them, and it is far less certain that anyone has the right to give them up. Giving up freedom degrades one's existence; giving up life ends it, as far as one can. No worldly good can make up for either loss. Giving up either for any price would therefore offend both nature and reason. But even if we could give away our freedom as we do our property, it would be very different for our children. They enjoy their father's property only because his right passes to them. Their freedom, however, is a gift they receive from nature by being human, and their parents have no right to take it away. Establishing slavery required violence against nature; perpetuating this supposed right required changing nature itself. The legal scholars who solemnly declared that the child of an enslaved woman would be born a slave were saying, in other words, that a human being would not be born human.\n\nI therefore think it certain not only that governments did not begin with arbitrary power, which is merely their corruption and final extreme, returning them in the end to the very law of the strongest that they first served to remedy. Even if they had begun that way, such power is illegitimate by its nature. It could not have provided a foundation for the rights of society and therefore could not have justified inequality established by institutions.\n\nI will not now enter into the still unfinished inquiry into the nature of the basic pact behind every government. Following the common view, I will consider the establishment of the political body here as a real contract between the people and the leaders they choose. Both parties undertake to observe the laws set out in that contract, which are the ties that unite them. For the purposes of social relations, the people have joined all their separate wills into one. Every matter on which this collective will expresses itself becomes a fundamental law binding every member of the State without exception. One such law governs the choice and powers of the magistrates responsible for seeing that the others are carried out. Their power covers everything needed to preserve the constitution but not to change it. Honors are added to make the laws and their officers respected; the officers also personally receive privileges that compensate them for the hard work of good administration. The magistrate, for his part, undertakes to use the power entrusted to him only according to the wishes of those who appointed him. He must ensure that everyone enjoys what belongs to them in peace and always put the public interest ahead of his own. Before experience revealed the inevitable abuses of such an arrangement, or an understanding of the human heart made them foreseeable, it must have seemed especially good. The very people charged with preserving it had the greatest interest in doing so. The magistracy and its rights existed only under the fundamental laws. If those laws were destroyed, the magistrates would immediately lose their legitimacy and the people would no longer have to obey them. The State's essential foundation would have been the law, not the magistrate; each person would therefore regain their natural freedom by right.\n\nA little careful thought would confirm this with further reasons. The nature of the contract shows that it cannot be irrevocable. If there is no higher power to guarantee that the parties keep faith and compel them to fulfill their mutual commitments, each party remains the sole judge of its own case. Each would always have the right to abandon the contract as soon as it judged the other to have broken its terms, or as soon as those terms no longer suited it. This seems to be the principle on which a right to abdicate can rest. Now, considering only the human institution as we are doing, suppose the magistrate, who holds all the power and claims all the advantages of the contract, nevertheless has the right to resign his authority. All the more should the people, who pay for all their leaders' mistakes, have the right to end their dependence. But the dreadful conflicts and endless disorder that would necessarily follow from this dangerous power show more clearly than anything else how badly human governments needed a stronger foundation than reason alone. Public peace required divine will to intervene and give sovereign authority a sacred, inviolable character, removing from subjects the disastrous right to dispose of it. Even if religion had done only this for humanity, it would be enough to make everyone cherish and adopt it, despite its abuses. It still prevents more bloodshed than fanaticism causes. But let us continue with our hypothesis. Different forms of government arose from the greater or lesser differences among individuals at the moment governments were established. Was one person outstanding in power, virtue, wealth, or influence? He alone was elected magistrate, and the State became a monarchy. If several people, roughly equal to each other, stood above all the rest, they were elected together, and there was an aristocracy. Where fortunes and talents were less unequal and people had strayed least from the state of nature, they kept supreme administration in common and formed a democracy. Time showed which of these forms benefited people most. Some remained subject only to laws; others soon obeyed masters. Citizens wanted to keep their freedom. Subjects thought only of taking freedom away from their neighbors, unable to bear the thought that others enjoyed a good they themselves had lost. In short, one side had wealth and conquest; the other, happiness and virtue.\n\nIn these various governments, all magistrates were elected at first. When wealth did not decide the outcome, preference went to merit, which gives a person natural influence, and to age, which brings experience in public affairs and calm judgment in deliberation. The elders of the Hebrews, the Gerontes of Sparta, the Senate of Rome, and even the origin of our word Seigneur show how much old age was once respected. The more often elections went to older men, the more often elections had to be held and the more obvious their difficulties became. Canvassing crept in, factions formed, parties grew bitter, civil wars broke out. At last citizens' blood was sacrificed to what was called the good of the State, and society came close to falling back into the anarchy of earlier times. Leading men used these circumstances to keep their offices in their families. The people were already used to dependence, comfort, and the conveniences of life, and could no longer break their chains. They agreed to increase their servitude to strengthen their peace. That is how leaders whose positions had become hereditary got used to treating their office as family property, and themselves as owners of a State of which they had at first been merely officers. They called their fellow citizens their slaves, counted them as livestock among their possessions, and called themselves equals of the gods and kings of kings.\n\nIf we follow the development of inequality through these different changes, we find that the establishment of law and property rights was its first stage; the establishment of magistrates was its second; and the third and final stage was the change from legitimate to arbitrary power. The first stage sanctioned the condition of rich and poor; the second, powerful and weak; and the third, master and slave. This is the last degree of inequality and the endpoint toward which all the others eventually lead, until new upheavals dissolve the government completely or bring it nearer to its legitimate foundation.\n\nTo understand why this development was necessary, we should focus less on the reasons for establishing the political body than on the form it takes in practice and the problems it brings. The vices that make social institutions necessary also make their abuse inevitable. Sparta alone was an exception: there the law was chiefly concerned with children's education, and Lycurgus established customs that made further laws almost unnecessary. Laws in general are weaker than passions and restrain people without changing them. It would thus be easy to prove that a government which always pursued its founding purpose exactly, without corruption or change, would never have needed to be founded. A country where no one evaded the laws or abused public office would need neither magistrates nor laws.\n\n### Part Two, 5\n\nPolitical distinctions necessarily produce distinctions among private citizens. As inequality grows between the people and their leaders, it soon appears among individuals too. It takes a thousand different forms according to their passions, talents, and circumstances. A magistrate cannot seize illegitimate power without gathering supporters and giving them some share of it. Besides, citizens allow themselves to be oppressed only because blind ambition drives them to look below rather than above themselves. They come to value dominating others more than being independent and agree to wear chains so that they can put chains on others in turn. It is very hard to make someone obey who has no wish to command. Even the cleverest politician could not bring people under his control if all they wanted was to be free. But inequality spreads easily among ambitious and cowardly people. They are always ready to take their chances with fortune, and nearly as ready to dominate as to serve, depending on whether fortune favors or opposes them. So a time must have come when the people were so dazzled that their leaders needed only to tell the most insignificant man, “Be great, you and your whole family line.” At once he seemed great to everyone and to himself. His descendants rose higher still the further they were from him. The more distant and uncertain the supposed cause, the greater the effect. The more idlers a family could count among its members, the more distinguished it became.\n\nIf this were the place for details, I could easily explain how differences in influence and authority inevitably arise among individuals (Note 19). Once they are gathered into one society, they must compare themselves and take account of the differences they find as they constantly deal with one another. These differences come in many forms. But wealth, noble birth or rank, power, and personal merit are the main distinctions by which people measure themselves in society. I would show that the agreement or conflict among these four kinds of power is the surest indication of whether a State is well or badly organized. Of these four kinds of inequality, personal qualities are the source of all the others. I would show that in the end they all come down to wealth, because wealth is the most directly useful for comfort and the easiest to pass on. It can readily be used to buy everything else. This observation lets us judge fairly accurately how far each people has moved from its original institutions and how far it has traveled toward complete corruption. I would point out how the universal desire for reputation, honors, and special treatment consumes us all, puts our talents and abilities to work and measures them against each other. It stirs up and multiplies our passions, turns everyone into competitors, rivals, or rather enemies, and produces daily reversals, successes, and disasters of every kind by making so many people run in the same race. I would show that this hunger to be talked about, this obsession with standing out that almost always takes us outside ourselves, gives rise to the best and worst things among human beings: our virtues and vices, our sciences and errors, our conquerors and philosophers. In other words, it produces a multitude of bad things alongside a small number of good ones. Finally, I would show why a handful of powerful and wealthy people stand at the height of status and fortune while the crowd crawls in obscurity and misery. The first group values what it enjoys only because the others are deprived of it. Without any change in its own circumstances, it would cease to be happy if the people ceased to be miserable.\n\nBut these details alone would fill a substantial book. It would weigh the advantages and disadvantages of every government against the rights people had in the state of nature. It would reveal all the different forms in which inequality has appeared up to now, and those it may take in future centuries, according to the nature of governments and the changes time will inevitably bring them. We would see the masses oppressed at home as a consequence of the very precautions they had taken against outside threats. We would see oppression steadily increase while those suffering it could never know where it would end or what lawful means they still had to stop it. We would see citizens' rights and national freedoms fade little by little, while the complaints of the weak were treated as seditious grumbling. We would see political leaders limit the honor of defending the common cause to a paid section of the people. This would make taxes necessary. A discouraged farmer would leave his field even in peacetime, put down his plow, and take up a sword. We would see the disastrous, strange rules of the code of honor appear. We would see the country's defenders sooner or later become its enemies and constantly hold a dagger over their fellow citizens. A time would come when we would hear them tell their country's oppressor:\n\nIf you order me to drive a sword into my brother's breast\nAnd my father's throat, and into the belly of my wife,\nPregnant and near childbirth, I will do it all, though my hand resists.\n\nFrom extreme inequality of position and fortune, differences in passions and talents, useless arts, harmful arts, and trivial sciences would come crowds of prejudices equally opposed to reason, happiness, and virtue. We would see leaders encourage anything that can weaken people gathered together by dividing them; anything that can make society appear united while planting the seeds of real division; anything that can inspire mutual distrust and hatred among the different orders by setting their rights and interests against each other. All this would strengthen the power that holds them all in check.\n\nFrom this disorder and these upheavals, despotism would gradually raise its hideous head. It would devour everything good and healthy it saw in every part of the State. At last it would trample both laws and people underfoot and establish itself on the ruins of the republic. The time before this final change would be full of turmoil and disaster. In the end the monster would swallow everything. Peoples would no longer have leaders or laws, only tyrants. From then on, there would be no question of morals or virtue. Wherever despotism rules, “it has no hope of gain from honorable conduct,” and tolerates no other master. As soon as it speaks, there is no integrity or duty to consider. The only virtue left to slaves is the blindest obedience.\n\nThis is the last stage of inequality, the endpoint that closes the circle and meets the point where we began. Here all individuals become equal again because they count for nothing. Subjects have no law but their master's will, and the master has no guide but his passions. Ideas of good and principles of justice disappear once more. Everything returns to the law of the strongest alone, and thus to a new state of nature. It differs from the one we started with: the first was the state of nature in its pure form, while this last one is the result of extreme corruption. Otherwise there is so little difference between the two states, and despotism so thoroughly dissolves the contract of government, that a despot remains master only while he is the strongest. As soon as people can drive him out, he has no grounds for objecting to their violence. An uprising that ends in strangling or dethroning a sultan is just as lawful an act as those by which he disposed of his subjects' lives and property the day before. Force alone kept him in power; force alone brings him down. Everything thus happens according to the natural order. Whatever the outcome of these brief, frequent upheavals, no one can complain of another's injustice, only of their own lack of foresight or their bad luck.\n\nBy uncovering and following the forgotten, lost paths that must have led humanity from the state of nature to civil society, and by restoring the intermediate stages I have left out for lack of time or failed to imagine, along with those I have just described, any attentive reader will be struck by the vast distance between the two states. In this slow sequence of changes, the reader will find the answer to countless moral and political questions that philosophers cannot solve. They will understand that humanity in one age is not the humanity of another. Diogenes could find no human being because he sought among his contemporaries a person from an age that had passed. Cato, the reader will say, died with Rome and freedom because he was out of place in his century. The greatest of men merely astonished a world that he would have governed five hundred years earlier. In short, the reader will understand how the human mind and its passions gradually change and almost take on a different nature. Our needs and pleasures eventually turn toward different objects. As the original human being gradually disappears, society offers a wise observer only a collection of artificial people and manufactured passions, created by all these new relationships and lacking any real basis in nature. What thought teaches us about this, observation fully confirms. The person living outside civilization and the civilized person differ so deeply in their hearts and desires that what makes one supremely happy would drive the other to despair. The first wants only rest and freedom. They want to live and be idle. Even a Stoic's inner calm falls short of their deep indifference to everything else. The citizen, by contrast, is always busy, sweating, rushing around, and tormenting themselves in search of still harder work. They work until death; they even race toward death to put themselves in a position to live, or give up life to gain immortality. They court the powerful whom they hate and the rich whom they despise. They spare no effort to win the honor of serving them. They proudly boast of their own low position and of their patrons' protection. Proud of their slavery, they speak with contempt of those who do not have the honor of sharing it. How a Caribbean person would look at the demanding and envied work of a European minister! How many cruel deaths would that carefree person prefer to the horror of such a life, which often does not even offer the comfort of doing good? But to grasp the aim of all that effort, the words “power” and “reputation” would have to mean something to them. They would have to learn that some people attach importance to what the rest of the world thinks, and know how to feel happy and satisfied with themselves on the strength of others' approval rather than their own. This is indeed the real cause of all these differences. The person living outside civilization lives within themselves; the social person always lives outside themselves, finding life only in others' opinions. From their judgment alone, so to speak, that person gets a sense of their own existence. It is not my subject to show how this disposition produces so much indifference to good and evil alongside such fine speeches about morals. Nor is it my subject to show how, when everything comes down to appearances, everything becomes artificial and performed: honor, friendship, virtue, and often even vices, which people finally learn to boast about. In short, we always ask others who we are and never dare to ask ourselves. Surrounded by so much philosophy, humaneness, courtesy, and lofty principles, we have only a shallow, deceptive outward show: honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. It is enough for me to have shown that this is not humanity's original condition. Only the spirit of society and the inequality it produces change and distort all our natural inclinations in this way.\n\nI have tried to explain the origin and development of inequality, and the establishment and abuse of political societies, as far as these things can be inferred from human nature by reason alone, independently of the sacred doctrines that give sovereign authority the sanction of divine right. This account shows that inequality, almost nonexistent in the state of nature, gains its strength and grows as our abilities develop and the human mind advances. Finally, the establishment of property and laws makes it stable and legitimate. It also shows that moral inequality, authorized solely by established law, runs counter to natural right whenever it does not match physical inequality in the same proportion. That distinction is enough to tell us what to think of the kind of inequality found among all civilized peoples. For it is plainly contrary to the Law of Nature, however we define it, that a child should command an old person, that a fool should lead a wise person, or that a handful of people should have more than they need while the hungry majority lacks life's necessities.\n\n### Notes, 1\n\nNOTES\n\nNote 1\n\nHerodotus tells us that after the false Smerdis was killed, the seven men who had freed Persia met to decide what form of government to give the state. Otanes argued strongly for a republic. This was a remarkable opinion from a satrap: besides any claim he might have made to the throne, great men fear a government that forces them to respect other people more than they fear death. As one might expect, no one listened to Otanes. When he saw that they were going to choose a monarch, he willingly gave up his claim to the crown to the other candidates. He wanted neither to obey nor to command. In return he asked only that he and his descendants be free and independent, and this was granted. Even if Herodotus had not told us of the limit placed on this privilege, we would have to assume one. Otherwise Otanes, subject to no law and accountable to nobody, would have been all-powerful in the state, even more powerful than the king. But a man satisfied with such a privilege in those circumstances was hardly likely to abuse it. In fact, there is no sign that this right ever caused the slightest trouble in the kingdom, either through the wise Otanes or through any of his descendants.\n\nNote 2\n\nAt my very first step I confidently rely on one of those authorities philosophers respect, because its words come from sound and profound reasoning that only philosophers know how to discover and appreciate.\n\n“However much interest we have in knowing ourselves, I do not know whether we know everything outside ourselves better. Nature has equipped us with organs meant solely to keep us alive, yet we use them only to receive impressions from outside. We only try to reach outward and exist outside ourselves. We are so busy increasing what our senses do and extending our being into the outside world that we rarely use the inner sense that brings us back to our true size and separates us from everything that is not part of us. Yet this is the sense we must use if we want to know ourselves. It is the only one by which we can judge ourselves. But how can we make it fully active and give it its full range? How can we free our soul, where this sense resides, from all the illusions of our minds? We have lost the habit of using it. It has gone without exercise amid the noise of our bodily sensations, and the fire of our passions has dried it up. Our heart, our mind, our senses—everything has worked against it.” Natural History, T4, p. 151, On the Nature of Man.\n\nNote 3\n\nWalking on two feet for a long time may have changed the shape of the human body. This possibility, the resemblance still seen between our arms and the front legs of four-legged animals, and an inference drawn from how those animals walk may raise doubts about which way of walking is most natural for us. Every child starts by going on all fours and needs our example and instruction to learn to stand upright. There are even peoples considered savage, such as the Hottentots, who pay so little attention to their children that they let them walk on their hands for so long that it becomes very hard to get them upright afterward. The children of the Caribs of the Antilles do the same. There are various examples of people who went on all fours. Among them I could cite the child found near Hesse in 1344, who had been raised by wolves. He later said at Prince Henry’s court that, if he had had his choice, he would have preferred to return to the wolves rather than live among people. He had grown so used to walking like those animals that pieces of wood had to be strapped to him to force him to stand upright and balance on his two feet. The same was true of the child found in 1694 in the forests of Lithuania, who lived among bears. According to M. de Condillac, he showed no sign of reason, walked on his feet and hands, had no language, and made sounds nothing like a human being’s. The little wild child of Hanover brought to the English court several years ago had enormous difficulty getting used to walking on two feet. In 1719, two other wild children were found in the Pyrenees, running through the mountains like four-legged animals. Someone might object that walking this way deprives us of the use of our hands, which are so useful to us. But monkeys show that hands can work perfectly well in both ways. The objection would prove only that humans can put their limbs to a more convenient use than nature gave them, not that nature meant humans to walk in a different way from the one she teaches them.\n\nBut it seems to me that there are much better reasons to maintain that humans are bipeds. First, even if someone showed that we could originally have been shaped differently from the way we are now and eventually become what we are, this would not be enough to conclude that it happened. Once the possibility of these changes had been shown, we would still need at least some evidence that they were likely before accepting them. Moreover, while human arms seem capable of serving as legs if necessary, that is the only observation in favor of the theory, against many that oppose it. Here are the main ones. The way a human head is joined to the body would, on all fours, point the eyes straight at the ground instead of directing the gaze horizontally, as it does in every other animal and in humans walking upright. This position would do little to help a person survive. Humans have no tail and need none when walking on two feet, but tails are useful to four-legged animals, and none of them lacks one. A woman’s breast is well placed for a biped who carries a child in her arms, but so badly placed for a quadruped that no such animal has its breasts there. The hindquarters are extremely high in proportion to the forelegs, which is why we drag ourselves on our knees when we go on all fours. The whole body would make a badly proportioned animal that could walk only awkwardly. If a human put the foot down flat like the hand, the hind leg would have one fewer joint than other animals have, namely the joint between the cannon bone and the shinbone. And if the foot rested only on its tip, as it would surely have to, the tarsus seems too large to serve as a cannon bone, quite apart from how many bones compose it. Its joints with the metatarsus and the shinbone are also too close together to give the human leg in that position the same flexibility as the legs of four-legged animals. The example of children proves nothing at all. They are at an age when their natural strength has not yet developed and their limbs have not grown firm. One might just as well say dogs are not meant to walk because they only crawl for a few weeks after birth. Individual cases carry little weight against the universal practice of all human beings, including peoples who had no contact with others and could not have imitated them. A child abandoned in a forest before learning to walk and raised by an animal would follow its foster mother’s example and practice walking like her. Habit might give the child an ability that did not come from nature. Just as people without arms can, through practice, do with their feet everything we do with our hands, the child might eventually learn to use hands as feet.\n\nNote 4\n\nIf any of my readers is so poor a natural scientist as to challenge my assumption that the earth is naturally fertile, I will answer with this passage:\n\n“Plants draw much more of the substance they need for nourishment from air and water than from soil. When they decay, therefore, they return more to the soil than they took from it. A forest also catches rainwater by holding back vapor. So if a wood were left undisturbed for a very long time, the layer of soil that supports plant growth would increase considerably. But animals return less to the soil than they take from it, while people consume enormous amounts of wood and plants for fire and other uses. It follows that the layer of fertile soil in an inhabited country must always shrink, eventually becoming like the land of Arabia Petraea or that of so many other regions of the East. That is in fact the part of the world longest inhabited, and only salt and sand are found there: the fixed salts of plants and animals remain, while all their other parts evaporate.” M. de Buffon, Natural History.\n\nTo this one may add factual evidence: almost all the uninhabited islands discovered in recent centuries were full of trees and plants of every kind. History also tells us of the immense forests that had to be cleared all over the earth as it became more populated and developed. On this I have three further observations. First, if any plants can make up for the loss of plant matter caused by animals, as M. de Buffon argues, forests can do so especially well. Their crowns and leaves collect and absorb more water and vapor than other plants. Second, the loss of soil—that is, the loss of matter that supports plant growth—must speed up as land is cultivated more intensively and its more industrious inhabitants consume more of all its products. My third and most important observation is that tree fruits provide animals with more abundant food than other plants can. I tested this myself by comparing the yields of two plots equal in size and quality, one covered with chestnut trees and the other planted with wheat.\n\nNote 5\n\nAmong four-legged animals, the two broadest ways to distinguish meat-eating species are by the shape of their teeth and the structure of their intestines. Animals that live only on plants all have flat teeth, like the horse, ox, sheep, and hare. Meat-eaters have pointed teeth, like the cat, dog, wolf, and fox. As for intestines, plant-eaters have some, such as the colon, that are not found in meat-eating animals. Since humans have teeth and intestines like those of plant-eating animals, it seems that they should naturally belong in that class. Anatomical observations confirm this view, and ancient records also strongly support it. “Dicaearchus,” says Saint Jerome, “reports in his Books of Greek Antiquities that under the reign of Saturn, when the earth was still fertile on its own, no one ate meat; everyone lived on fruits and vegetables that grew naturally.” (Lib. 2, Adv. Jovinian.) This shows how many arguments in my favor I have left aside. Prey is almost the only cause of fights among meat-eating animals, while plant-eaters live together in continual peace. If humans belonged to the latter class, they would clearly have found it much easier to survive in the state of nature, and had much less need and fewer occasions to leave it.\n\nNote 6\n\nAll knowledge that requires reflection, all knowledge gained only by linking ideas together and improved only step by step, seems entirely beyond the reach of the wild human being. That is because he has no communication with others like himself: he lacks both the means of communicating and the needs that would make it necessary. His knowledge and skills are limited to jumping, running, fighting, throwing a stone, and climbing a tree. But although these are all he does, he does them much better than we do, since we have less need of them. And because they depend only on physical exercise, and cannot be passed from one person to another or improved across generations, the first human could have been just as skilled at them as his latest descendants.\n\nTravelers’ accounts are full of examples of the strength and vigor of people among nations called barbarian and savage. They praise these people’s skill and speed almost as highly. All one needs to observe these things is a pair of eyes, so there is no reason not to believe eyewitnesses who report them. I take a few examples at random from the first books that come to hand.\n\n### Notes, 2\n\n“The Hottentots,” says Kolben, “are better at fishing than the Europeans at the Cape. They are equally skilled with the net, hook, and spear, in coves and in rivers. They are no less skilled at catching fish with their hands. Their swimming skill is unmatched. Their way of swimming is surprising and entirely their own. They hold their bodies upright and their hands out of the water, so that they seem to walk on land. Even in the roughest sea, when the waves rise like mountains, they seem to dance on the backs of the waves, bobbing up and down like a cork.” “The Hottentots,” the same author continues, “show amazing skill in hunting, and their running speed is beyond belief.” He is surprised that they do not more often misuse their agility, although they sometimes do, as his example shows: “A Dutch sailor landing at the Cape,” he says, “asked a Hottentot to carry a roll of tobacco weighing about twenty pounds and follow him into town. When they were both some distance from the group, the Hottentot asked the sailor whether he could run. ‘Run!’ the Dutchman answered. ‘Yes, very well.’ ‘Let’s see,’ replied the African. He ran away with the tobacco and almost at once disappeared. The sailor, stunned by this extraordinary speed, did not even think of chasing him, and never saw either his tobacco or its carrier again.”\n\n“They have such quick eyes and such accurate hands that Europeans cannot come close. At a hundred paces they can hit a target the size of a half-sol coin with a stone. What is even more surprising is that, instead of fixing their eyes on the target as we do, they keep moving and twisting their bodies. Their stone seems to be carried by an invisible hand.” Father du Tertre says much the same thing about the Indigenous people of the Antilles as we have just read about the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope. He especially praises their accuracy in shooting birds in flight and swimming fish with arrows; they then dive to retrieve them. The Indigenous peoples of North America are no less famous for their strength and skill. Here is an example that may show the abilities of the Indigenous peoples of South America. In 1746, an Indigenous man from Buenos Aires, sentenced to serve in the galleys at Cádiz, offered the governor a way to win back his freedom by risking his life at a public festival. He promised to face the fiercest bull alone with nothing in his hand but a rope. He would throw it down, catch it by whatever part of its body the governor specified, saddle it, bridle it, and ride it. On its back he would fight two more of the fiercest bulls brought out of the torillo, and kill them one after the other, at the moment he was ordered to do so, without anyone’s help. The governor agreed. The man kept his word and succeeded in everything he had promised. For his method and all the details of the fight, see the first in-12 volume of M. Gautier’s Observations on Natural History, from which this account is taken, page 262.\n\nNote 7\n\n“The length of horses’ lives,” says M. de Buffon, “is, as with all other animal species, proportional to the time they take to grow. A human takes fourteen years to grow and can live six or seven times as long, that is, ninety or a hundred years. A horse takes four years to grow and can live six or seven times as long, that is, twenty-five or thirty years. Examples that might contradict this rule are so rare that they should not even be treated as exceptions from which conclusions can be drawn. And since large horses finish growing sooner than fine-bred horses, they also live less long and are old by the age of fifteen.”\n\nNote 8\n\nI think I see another difference between meat-eating and plant-eating animals, more general even than the one I noted in the note on page 163, since it extends to birds. This difference lies in the number of young. Species that live only on plants never have more than two young in a litter, while meat-eating animals ordinarily have more than two. Here we can easily see nature’s intention from the number of teats. Females of the first kind, such as mares, cows, goats, does, and ewes, have only two. Other females, such as female dogs, cats, wolves, and tigers, always have six or eight. Hens, geese, and ducks are all meat-eating birds, as are eagles, hawks, and owls. They also lay and hatch many eggs. Pigeons, turtledoves, and birds that eat nothing but grain never do this; they usually lay and hatch only two eggs at a time. The reason we may give for this difference is that animals living only on grasses and plants spend almost the whole day grazing. Since they must devote so much time to feeding themselves, they could not nurse several young. Meat-eaters, by contrast, eat a meal almost at once. They can return to their young and to hunting more easily and more often, and replace such a large supply of milk. Many specific observations and reflections could be made about all this, but this is not the place for them. It is enough that I have shown here nature’s most general system. That system provides another reason to remove humans from the class of meat-eating animals and place them among plant-eating species.\n\nNote 9\n\nA famous author calculated the good and bad things in human life and compared the two totals. He found that the bad things far outweighed the good and that, taken as a whole, life was a rather poor gift to humans. His conclusion does not surprise me. All his reasoning came from the condition of people in civil society. If he had gone back to natural man, we can expect that his results would have been very different. He would have seen that people have few troubles except those they bring on themselves, and nature would have been cleared of blame. It has taken a good deal of effort for us to make ourselves so unhappy. On the one hand, think of humanity’s enormous works: so many sciences thoroughly studied, so many arts invented, so much strength put to use; chasms filled, mountains leveled, rocks broken, rivers made navigable, lands cleared, lakes dug, marshes drained, huge buildings raised on land, and the sea covered with ships and sailors. On the other hand, stop to consider what real benefits all this has brought to human happiness. The startling gap between the two cannot fail to strike us. We can only regret the blindness that drives people to chase eagerly after every misery they are capable of suffering, just to feed their foolish pride and a vain admiration of themselves. Kind nature had taken care to keep these miseries away from them.\n\nPeople are wicked; sad and constant experience makes proof unnecessary. Yet human beings are naturally good, as I believe I have shown. What, then, could have corrupted them so deeply except the changes in their condition, the progress they have made, and the knowledge they have gained? Admire human society as much as you like. It remains true that society necessarily leads people to hate each other as their interests come into conflict, to do each other favors in appearance, and in reality to inflict every imaginable harm on each other. What can we think of a system of dealings in which each person’s reasoning tells him to follow rules directly opposed to those that public reason preaches to society as a whole? In it, each person profits from other people’s misfortunes. There may not be a single well-off person whose greedy heirs, often his own children, do not secretly wish him dead; not a single ship at sea whose wreck would not be good news to some merchant; not a single house that some debtor would not like to see burn down, with all the papers inside it; not a single people that does not rejoice at its neighbors’ disasters. In this way we profit from the harm done to others, and one person’s loss almost always brings another person prosperity. More dangerous still, a great many people look forward to public disasters and hope for them. Some want disease, others mortality, others war, others famine. I have seen dreadful people weep with grief at the prospect of a year of plentiful harvests. The great and disastrous fire of London, which cost so many unfortunate people their lives or property, may have made the fortunes of more than ten thousand others. I know that Montaigne criticizes the Athenian Demades for having a workman punished because he sold coffins at a high price and made a great deal of money from his fellow citizens’ deaths. But Montaigne’s reason is that everyone would have to be punished; clearly, this supports my own arguments. Let us look past our empty displays of goodwill to see what is going on deep in people’s hearts. Consider what life must be like where everyone is forced to flatter and destroy one another, where people are born enemies out of duty and cheats for profit. If someone tells me that society is arranged so that everyone gains by serving others, I will reply that this would be very good if people did not gain even more by harming them. No legitimate profit cannot be exceeded by an illegitimate one, and harming a neighbor is always more profitable than helping one. The only remaining task is to find ways to avoid punishment. The powerful use all their strength for this, and the weak use all their cunning.\n\nWhen a wild human being has eaten his meal, he is at peace with all nature and a friend to all others like him. Does he sometimes have to fight over food? He never comes to blows before comparing how hard it would be to win with how hard it would be to find food somewhere else. Pride plays no part in the fight, so it ends with a few punches. The winner eats, the loser goes elsewhere to try his luck, and peace returns. But for a person living in society, things are very different. First he must secure what he needs, then what he does not need. Next come luxuries, then vast wealth, then subjects, then slaves. He never has a moment’s rest. Most remarkably, the less natural and pressing these needs are, the stronger his passions become—and, worse, the greater his power to satisfy them. So after a long run of success, after swallowing up many fortunes and laying waste to many lives, my hero will end by slaughtering everyone until he alone rules the universe. This is a brief moral picture, if not of human life, then at least of the secret ambitions in the heart of every civilized person.\n\nCompare without prejudice the condition of a person in civil society with that of a wild human being. Try, if you can, to count how many new ways the first has opened up for pain and death, besides his wickedness, needs, and miseries. Think of the mental suffering that eats away at us; the violent passions that drain and devastate us; the excessive work imposed on the poor; the even more dangerous softness in which the rich indulge, so that the poor die for lack of necessities and the rich from excess. Think of the monstrous combinations of foods, their harmful seasonings, spoiled goods, adulterated drugs, the fraud of those who sell them, the errors of those who administer them, and poison from the vessels in which they are prepared. Think of the epidemics caused by foul air wherever great crowds of people gather, and the illnesses brought on by our delicate way of life, by moving back and forth between our homes and the open air, and by putting on or taking off clothes too carelessly. Think also of all the forms of care that excessive indulgence has turned into necessities, so that neglecting or going without them later costs us our health or our lives. Add the fires and earthquakes that consume or overturn whole cities, killing thousands of inhabitants. In short, put together the dangers that all these causes constantly bring down on our heads. Then you will see how dearly nature makes us pay for ignoring her lessons.\n\n### Notes, 3\n\nI will not repeat here what I have said elsewhere about war. But I wish well-informed people would, or dared to, give the public a detailed account of the horrors committed in armies by contractors who supply food and run hospitals. We would see that their not very secret dealings can make even the finest armies melt away almost overnight, killing more soldiers than enemy weapons do. Another shocking count is the number of people swallowed by the sea every year, whether through hunger, scurvy, pirates, fire, or shipwreck. Clearly we must also charge established property, and therefore society, with murders, poisonings, highway robberies, and even the punishment of these crimes. Such punishment is necessary to prevent greater harm, but when a murder costs two or more people their lives instead of one, it still doubles the loss of human life. How many shameful ways there are to prevent people from being born and to thwart nature! There are the brutal and perverted desires that insult her most charming creation. Neither wild peoples nor animals ever knew these desires; they have arisen in developed countries only through a corrupted imagination. There are secret abortions, fitting fruits of debauchery and a misguided idea of honor. There is the abandonment or murder of many children, victims of their parents’ poverty or their mothers’ cruel shame. And there is the mutilation of unfortunate people whose lives are diminished and whose entire line of descendants is sacrificed to empty songs or, worse still, to the brutal jealousy of some men. In the latter case this mutilation offends nature twice: in the treatment of those who undergo it, and in the use to which they are put. What if I tried to show the human species attacked at its very source, even in the most sacred bond of all? People no longer dare to listen to nature there until they have first consulted their fortunes. In this disorder of civil society, which confuses virtue with vice, abstaining from sex becomes a criminal precaution and refusing to give life to another human being becomes an act of kindness. But rather than tear away the veil covering so many horrors, let us simply point out an evil that others must remedy.\n\nAdd to all this the many unhealthy occupations that shorten lives or damage the body. These include mining and the various ways of preparing metals and minerals, especially lead, copper, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, and realgar. Add the other dangerous trades that cost many workers their lives every day: roofers, carpenters, masons, and quarry workers. Put all these things together, I say, and we can see in the establishment and advancement of societies the reasons for the decrease in the human population observed by more than one philosopher.\n\nLuxury cannot be prevented among people eager for their own comfort and for the regard of others. It soon finishes the harm that societies have begun. On the pretext of supporting poor people who should never have been brought into that condition, it impoverishes everyone else and sooner or later depopulates the state.\n\nLuxury is a cure much worse than the disease it claims to cure. Rather, it is itself the worst of all evils, in any state, large or small. To feed the crowds of servants and destitute people it has created, it overwhelms and ruins the farmer and the citizen. It is like the burning south winds: they cover grass and green plants with devouring insects, deprive useful animals of food, and bring scarcity and death wherever they blow.\n\nSociety and the luxury it produces give rise to the liberal and mechanical arts, trade, literature, and all these useless things. They make industry flourish, enrich states, and ruin them. The reason for this decline is very simple. Agriculture must naturally be the least profitable of all trades, as is easy to see. Everyone needs what it produces, so its price must be within the means of the poorest people. The same principle gives us this rule: as a general matter, the less useful a trade is, the more profitable it is. The most necessary trades must eventually become the most neglected. This shows what to think about industry’s true benefits and the real effects of its progress.\n\nThese are the visible causes of all the miseries into which wealth finally drives even the most admired nations. As industry and the arts spread and prosper, the farmer is despised, burdened with taxes needed to maintain luxury, and condemned to spend his life working while going hungry. He abandons his fields to seek in the cities the bread that he should be bringing to them. The more the great cities dazzle the unthinking public, the more we should mourn the abandoned countryside, the uncultivated land, and the highways flooded with unfortunate citizens who have become beggars or thieves. One day they will end their suffering on the breaking wheel or a dung heap. This is how a state grows rich on one side while growing weaker and less populated on the other. After working hard to become wealthy and empty, the most powerful monarchies eventually fall prey to poor nations. Those nations give in to the fatal temptation to invade them and become rich and weak in their turn, until they too are invaded and destroyed by others.\n\nWill someone please explain what produced the swarms of peoples called barbarians that swept across Europe, Asia, and Africa for so many centuries? Did they owe their enormous population to the sophistication of their arts, the wisdom of their laws, or the excellence of their public order? Let our scholars tell us why these fierce, rough people, without knowledge, restraint, or education, did not simply kill one another at every moment in fights over grazing land or game, instead of increasing so greatly in number. Let them explain how these wretches even dared to face us, such skillful people with such fine military discipline, fine law codes, and wise laws. Finally, since society has become more developed in northern countries, and so much effort has gone into teaching people their mutual duties and how to live together pleasantly and peacefully, why do those countries no longer produce anything like the multitudes they once produced? I fear someone may finally decide to answer that people wisely invented all these great things—the arts, sciences, and laws—as a helpful plague to prevent the human species from multiplying too much, for fear that this world, meant for us, would eventually become too small for its inhabitants.\n\nWhat, then? Must we destroy societies, abolish what is yours and mine, and go back to living in the forests with bears? That is just the sort of conclusion my opponents would draw. I would rather head it off than let them disgrace themselves by drawing it. You who have not heard the voice of heaven, and who see no purpose for our species other than to finish this short life in peace: you can leave your harmful acquisitions, restless minds, corrupted hearts, and unrestrained desires behind in the cities. Since you can, recover your old, original innocence. Go into the woods to lose sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries. Do not fear that you will degrade the human species by giving up its knowledge in order to give up its vices. But there are people like me, whose passions have destroyed their original simplicity forever, who can no longer live on grass and acorns or do without laws and leaders. There are those whose first father was honored with supernatural instruction. They will see why a rule that is unimportant in itself, and impossible to explain under any other account, was given: its purpose was to give human actions a moral character from the start, something they would otherwise not have acquired for a long time. In short, there are those convinced that the divine voice called the whole human race to the knowledge and happiness of heavenly minds. By practicing the virtues they commit themselves to as they learn to know them, all these people will try to deserve the eternal reward they expect. They will respect the sacred bonds of the societies to which they belong. They will love other people and serve them with all their strength. They will carefully obey the laws and the people who make and enforce them. Above all, they will honor good and wise rulers who can prevent, cure, or ease the many abuses and evils always ready to overwhelm us. They will encourage the efforts of these worthy leaders by showing them, without fear or flattery, how great their task is and how demanding their duty. But they will still look down on a form of society that can survive only with the help of so many admirable people, whom we wish for more often than we actually find. For despite all their efforts, it always produces more real disasters than apparent benefits.\n\nNote 10\n\nAmong the people we know, whether directly or through historians or travelers, some are black, others white, and others red. Some have long hair, others only curly woolly hair. Some are almost completely hairy, while others do not even have beards. There have been, and perhaps still are, nations of people of gigantic height. Leaving aside the story of the Pygmies, which may well be an exaggeration, we know that the Lapps and especially the Greenlanders are far below average human height. Some even claim that whole peoples have tails like four-legged animals. We need not blindly trust Herodotus and Ctesias to draw at least one very plausible conclusion from their accounts. If good observations could have been made in those ancient times, when different peoples lived in ways more unlike one another than they do today, observers would also have noticed much more striking differences in body shape and bearing. All these facts can easily be supported by indisputable evidence. They surprise only people used to looking no farther than their immediate surroundings, who do not know the powerful effects of differences in climate, air, food, ways of life, and habits in general. Above all, they do not know the astonishing force of these same causes when they act continuously over many generations. Today trade, travel, and conquest bring different peoples together more often, and regular contact keeps making their ways of life more alike. We can see certain differences between nations diminish. For example, anyone can see that the French today are no longer the large, fair-skinned, fair-haired people described by Latin historians. And yet the passage of time, together with the mixing of Franks and Normans, who were themselves fair-skinned and fair-haired, should have restored whatever influence the climate once had on the natural build and complexion of the inhabitants before contact with the Romans weakened it. All these observations about the differences that a thousand causes can produce, and really have produced, in the human species make me wonder about various humanlike animals. Travelers may have taken them for beasts without looking closely, because of some differences in their outward form or simply because they could not speak. Might they actually be true wild human beings? Perhaps their ancestors, long scattered through the forests, had had no chance to develop any of their potential abilities or reach any stage of improvement, and they were still in the original state of nature. Let me give an example of what I mean.\n\n“The translator of the History of Voyages says that in the kingdom of Congo there are many of the large animals called Orang-Outangs in the East Indies. They seem to stand midway between the human species and baboons. Battel reports that in the forests of Mayomba, in the kingdom of Loango, there are two kinds of creatures. The larger ones are called Pongos and the others Enjokos. The first look exactly like humans, but they are much bigger and very tall. They have human faces and deeply set eyes. Their hands, cheeks, and ears have no hair, except for very long eyebrows. Though the rest of their bodies are fairly hairy, their hair is not very thick, and it is brown. In fact, the only part that distinguishes them from humans is their leg, which has no calf. They walk upright, holding the hair on their necks with one hand. They retreat into the woods, sleep in trees, and make a sort of roof there to shelter themselves from rain. They eat fruit or wild nuts and never eat meat. Black people passing through the forests customarily light fires there at night. They observe that, when they leave in the morning, the pongos take their places around the fire and do not go away until it has gone out. For all their skill, they are not intelligent enough to keep it burning by adding wood. Sometimes they travel in groups and kill Black people crossing the forests. They even attack elephants that come to graze where they live. They hit the elephants so hard with their fists or sticks that they force them to flee, crying out. Pongos are never captured alive; they are so strong that ten men could not hold one. But Black people capture many young ones after killing the mother, to whose body the young one clings tightly. When one of these animals dies, the others cover its body with a heap of branches or leaves. Purchas adds that in his conversations with Battel, Battel himself told him that a pongo carried off a little Black boy who spent an entire month among these animals. They do not hurt the people they catch, at least when those people do not look at them, as the boy had noticed. Battel did not describe the second kind of creature.”\n\n### Notes, 4\n\nDapper confirms that the kingdom of Congo is full of the animals called orangutans in the Indies, meaning inhabitants of the woods, and called Quojas-Morros by Africans. This animal, he says, looks so much like a human that some travelers thought it might have been born of a woman and a monkey. Even the Black people reject that fantasy. One of these animals was taken from Congo to Holland and presented to Prince of Orange Frederick Henry. It was as tall as a three-year-old child and moderately stout, but squarely built and well proportioned, very agile and lively. Its legs were fleshy and strong; the entire front of its body was bare, but its back was covered with black hair. At first sight its face looked human, but its nose was flat and curved. Its ears, too, were like human ears. Its breasts, since it was female, were plump, its navel deep, its shoulders well joined, its hands divided into fingers and thumbs, and its calves and heels fat and fleshy. It often walked upright on its legs and could lift and carry fairly heavy loads. When it wanted a drink, it took the lid of the pot in one hand and held its bottom with the other. Then it wiped its lips gracefully. It lay down to sleep with its head on a pillow and covered itself so skillfully that one might have taken it for a person in bed. The Black people tell strange stories about this animal. They say not only that it forces itself on women and girls, but that it even dares attack armed men. In short, it seems very likely to be the satyr of the ancients. Merolla may be speaking only of these animals when he reports that the Black people sometimes catch wild men and women while hunting.\n\nThese human-shaped species are also mentioned in the third volume of the same History of Travels, under the names Beggos and Mandrills. But if we stick to the earlier accounts, the descriptions of these supposed monsters show striking similarities to the human species and smaller differences than those one could point out between one human and another. These passages give no reasons why their authors refuse to call the animals in question wild humans. We can easily guess that it is because the animals seemed stupid and did not speak. Those are weak reasons for anyone who knows that, although humans naturally have the organs of speech, speech itself is not natural to them, and who knows how far perfectibility may have raised civilized man above his original condition. The few lines in these descriptions show us how poorly these animals were observed and how many prejudices shaped what the observers saw. For example, they call them monsters, yet admit that they reproduce. In one place Battel says the pongos kill Black people crossing the forests; elsewhere Purchass adds that they do them no harm, even when they catch them by surprise, at least when the people do not persist in staring at them. Pongos gather around fires lit by the Black people after the people leave, and go away in turn when the fire goes out. Those are the facts. Now for the observer's comment: For all their cleverness, they do not have enough sense to keep the fire going by bringing it wood. I would like to know how Battel, or his compiler Purchass, could tell that the pongos left because they were stupid rather than because they wanted to. In a climate like Loango's, animals have little need of fire. If the Black people light fires, it is less to ward off cold than to frighten dangerous beasts. So it is perfectly simple to suppose that, after enjoying the flames for a while or warming themselves well, the pongos tire of staying in one place and go off to feed. Feeding takes them longer than it would if they ate meat. Besides, we know that most animals, including humans, are naturally lazy and avoid any effort that is not absolutely necessary. Finally, it seems very odd that the pongos, whose skill and strength are praised, who know how to bury their dead and make roofs out of branches, would not know how to push burning sticks into a fire. I remember seeing a monkey do exactly what we are told pongos cannot do. It is true that my thoughts were not directed toward this question at the time. I made the very mistake I blame our travelers for: I neglected to find out whether the monkey really intended to keep the fire going or merely, as I believe, to imitate a human action. In any case, it has been clearly shown that a monkey is not a variety of human. It is not only that a monkey cannot speak; above all, we know for certain that its species lacks the ability to improve itself, the distinguishing feature of the human species. But these tests do not seem to have been carried out carefully enough on the pongo and the orangutan to support the same conclusion. There is, however, a way by which even the crudest observers could conclusively establish whether the orangutan or other such creatures belong to the human species. But one generation would not be enough for this experiment. It must also be considered impossible in practice, since the hypothesis would have to be proven true before the experiment meant to establish the fact could be attempted without wrongdoing.\n\nHasty judgments that are not the product of informed reasoning tend toward extremes. Our travelers casually turn into beasts, under the names Pongos, Mandrills, and Orangutans, the very beings the ancients made into divinities under the names Satyrs, Fauns, and Sylvans. Perhaps more careful inquiry will show that they are human. Meanwhile, I think there is at least as much reason to trust Merolla on this matter as there is to trust the merchant Battel, Dapper, Purchass, and the other compilers. Merolla was an educated religious man and an eyewitness, and for all his simplicity he was not lacking in intelligence. What would such observers have made of the child found in 1694 whom I mentioned earlier? He showed no sign of reason, walked on his feet and hands, had no language, and made sounds quite unlike any human sounds. As the philosopher from whom I get this account goes on to say, it took a long time before he could utter a few words, and even then he spoke in a rough way. As soon as he could speak, people questioned him about his earlier condition. But he remembered no more of it than we remember what happened to us in the cradle. If this child had unfortunately fallen into the hands of our travelers, there is no doubt that, after noticing his silence and apparent stupidity, they would have sent him back into the woods or shut him up in a menagerie. Then they would have written learned and splendid accounts of him as a very curious beast that looked rather human.\n\nFor three or four hundred years, the inhabitants of Europe have been flooding the rest of the world and constantly publishing new collections of travels and accounts. Yet I am convinced that the only people we know are Europeans. Indeed, judging by the ridiculous prejudices that still survive even among educated people, each person, under the grand name of the study of humanity, seems to study little more than the people of his own country. Individuals may travel back and forth, but philosophy seems not to travel. Each people's philosophy is therefore of little use to another. The reason is clear, at least in distant regions. Only about four kinds of people make long voyages: sailors, merchants, soldiers, and missionaries. We should hardly expect good observers from the first three groups. As for the fourth, they are busy with the noble calling that draws them there. Even if they were not subject to professional prejudices like everyone else, we should expect them to be unwilling to pursue inquiries that seem like mere curiosity and distract them from the more important work to which they have dedicated themselves. Besides, to preach the Gospel effectively requires only zeal; God provides the rest. But studying human beings takes abilities that God has not promised to anyone and that even saints do not always have. Open any travel book and you find descriptions of people's characters and customs. Yet it is astonishing to see that people who have described so many things say only what everyone already knew. On the other side of the world, they noticed only what they could have seen without leaving their own street. The real traits that distinguish nations, obvious to eyes capable of seeing them, have almost always escaped theirs. That is how we got the fine moral saying, so often repeated by the crowd of would-be philosophers, that people are the same everywhere. Because they have the same passions and vices everywhere, it is supposedly almost useless to try to describe the distinctive character of different peoples. That is about as sound as saying that we cannot tell Peter from James because both have a nose, a mouth, and eyes.\n\nWill we never again see those happy times when people did not presume to philosophize, but Plato, Thales, and Pythagoras, driven by an intense desire to learn, undertook the longest journeys solely to educate themselves? They went far away to shake off the hold of national prejudices, to learn about people through their similarities and differences, and to gain universal knowledge. Such knowledge belongs to no single age or country; it belongs to all times and places and is, so to speak, the common science of the wise.\n\nPeople admire the splendor of a few enthusiasts who, at great expense, have traveled or sent others to the East with scholars and painters to draw ruins and decipher or copy inscriptions. But I find it hard to understand why, in an age that prides itself on great knowledge, we cannot find two men closely united, one rich in money and the other in genius, both eager for glory and hoping for immortality. One could devote twenty thousand écus of his wealth and the other ten years of his life to a celebrated journey around the world. For once they would study not always stones and plants but people and customs. After spending so many centuries measuring and examining the house, they might finally think of getting to know its inhabitants. The academicians who traveled through northern Europe and southern America went there more as surveyors than as philosophers. Still, since they were both, we cannot call the regions seen and described by La Condamine and Maupertuis entirely unknown. Chardin the jeweler, who traveled as Plato did, has left nothing unsaid about Persia. China seems to have been carefully observed by the Jesuits. Kempfer gives a fair idea of the little he saw in Japan. Apart from these accounts, we do not know the peoples of the East Indies. The Europeans who visit them care more about filling their purses than their heads. All of Africa and its many inhabitants, as distinctive in character as in color, still await examination. The whole earth is covered with nations of which we know only the names, and yet we presume to judge the human race! Imagine a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a Diderot, a Duclos, a d'Alembert, a Condillac, or men of their caliber, traveling to instruct their compatriots. Imagine them observing and describing, with their usual skill, Turkey, Egypt, Barbary, the empire of Morocco, Guinea, the land of the Cafres, Africa's interior and eastern coasts, Malabar, the Mogul, the banks of the Ganges, the kingdoms of Siam, Pegu, and Ava, China, Tartary, and above all Japan. Then, in the other hemisphere, imagine them visiting Mexico, Peru, Chile, the Magellanic lands, not forgetting the real or supposed Patagonians, Tucuman, Paraguay if possible, Brazil, and finally the Caribbean, Florida, and all the wild regions. This last would be the most important journey of all, the one needing the greatest care. Imagine these new Hercules returning from those memorable travels and then taking their time to write a natural, moral, and political history of what they had seen. We ourselves would see a new world emerge from their pens and would thereby learn to know our own. I say that when observers like these declare that one such animal is human and another is a beast, we should believe them. But it would be extremely naive to trust crude travelers on this point, travelers of whom we might sometimes be tempted to ask the very question they presume to settle about other animals.\n\nNote 11\n\n### Notes, 5\n\nThis seems completely obvious to me. I cannot understand where our philosophers could find all the passions they attribute to natural man. Apart from physical necessities, which nature itself demands, all our other needs become needs through habit, before which they were not needs, or through our desires; and we do not desire what we cannot know. The wild man therefore wants only what he knows and knows only what he can possess or easily get. It follows that nothing should be more peaceful than his mind or more limited than his understanding.\n\nNote 12\n\nIn Locke's Civil Government I find an objection that sounds too plausible for me to hide it. “The purpose of the union between male and female,” this philosopher says, “is not just to produce offspring but to carry on the species. So this union must last after reproduction, at least as long as the offspring need feeding and protection, that is, until they can meet their own needs. We see that creatures below humans consistently and exactly follow this rule established over the works of the Creator's hands by his infinite wisdom. Among animals that live on grass, the union between male and female lasts no longer than each act of mating. The mother's milk is enough to feed the young until they can graze, so the male does no more than beget them. After that he has nothing to do with the female or the young and cannot contribute to their support. But among beasts of prey the union lasts longer. The mother cannot easily feed herself and her young at the same time from her own hunting, a harder and more dangerous way of getting food than grazing. The male's help is therefore absolutely necessary to support their family, if we may use the word. Until the young can go hunting, the family cannot survive without the care of both male and female. We observe the same thing in all birds, except for some domesticated birds living where food is always abundant, freeing the male from the work of feeding the young. As long as the young need food in the nest, both male and female bring it to them, until they can fly and feed themselves.\n\n“To my mind, this is the main reason, if not the only one, why human males and females have to remain together longer than other creatures do. A woman can conceive and usually becomes pregnant again and bears another child long before the previous one can get along without its parents' help and meet its own needs. A father must therefore care for the children he has begotten, and care for them for a long time. He must also continue to live in a marital union with the same woman who bore them, and stay in it much longer than other creatures do. Among those creatures the young can live on their own before another breeding season comes. The tie between male and female then breaks on its own, and both are completely free until the season that usually draws animals together makes them choose new mates. Here we cannot sufficiently admire the Creator's wisdom. He gave humans qualities suited to providing for the future as well as the present, and wanted and arranged for the union of man and woman to last much longer than that of male and female among other creatures. This would encourage the work of both man and woman and unite their interests more closely as they made provisions for their children and left them property. Nothing could be more harmful to children than a casual, unstable bond or the easy and frequent ending of a marital union.”\n\nThe same love of truth that made me set out this objection honestly prompts me to add a few remarks. If they cannot answer it, they can at least make it clearer.\n\na. I will first note that moral arguments have little force in questions of physical fact. They are better at explaining existing facts than proving that those facts actually exist. Yet that is the kind of argument Mr. Locke uses in the passage I have just quoted. A lasting union between man and woman might benefit the human species. It does not follow that nature established it that way. Otherwise we would have to say nature also established civil society, the arts, commerce, and everything else supposedly useful to humans.\n\nb. I do not know where Mr. Locke found that the union of male and female lasts longer among beasts of prey than among animals that eat grass, or that one helps the other feed the young. Dogs, cats, bears, and wolves do not seem to recognize their mates any better than horses, rams, bulls, deer, and other four-legged animals recognize theirs. Indeed, if a mother needed the male's help to keep her young alive, this would seem most true of species that eat nothing but grass. The mother has to spend a long time grazing, and throughout that time must neglect her offspring. A bear or a she-wolf, by contrast, eats her prey in a moment. Without going hungry, she has more time to nurse her young. This reasoning is supported by an observation I made in note 2 on page 167 about the relative numbers of teats and young in meat-eating and plant-eating species. If the observation holds true generally, the fact that a woman has only two breasts and usually bears only one child at a time gives us another strong reason to doubt that the human species naturally eats meat. To reach Locke's conclusion, then, we would apparently have to reverse his reasoning entirely. The same distinction is no more convincing when applied to birds. Who could believe that male and female vultures and crows remain together longer than turtledoves do? Two kinds of domesticated birds, ducks and pigeons, give us examples directly opposed to his system. The pigeon eats only grain, stays with its mate, and shares the task of feeding their young. The duck, whose greed for food is well known, recognizes neither its mate nor its young and does nothing to help feed them. And among chickens, a species hardly less meat-eating, the rooster shows no concern at all for the brood. If the male does help the female feed the young in other bird species, that is because young birds cannot fly at first and cannot nurse from their mother. They are much less able to do without their father's help than four-legged animals, for whom the mother's milk is enough, at least for a while.\n\nc. There is considerable uncertainty about the main fact underlying Mr. Locke's whole argument. He claims that in the pure state of nature a woman usually becomes pregnant again and bears another child long before the previous one can provide for its own needs. To know whether this is so would require experiments that Locke certainly did not perform and that no one is in a position to perform. A husband and wife living together continuously have so many chances to bring about another pregnancy that it is very hard to believe a chance encounter or a simple physical impulse would produce pregnancies as often in the pure state of nature as in marital society. Such a slower pace might help make children stronger. It might also be offset by women's continuing to be able to conceive until a later age if they had made less use of that ability in their youth. As for children, there are many reasons to think that their strength and bodily capacities develop later among us than they did in the original condition I am discussing. They inherit weakness from the constitution of their parents. We wrap and restrict all their limbs, raise them in softness, and perhaps feed them milk other than their mother's. All this works against and slows the earliest steps of their natural development. We also force them to apply themselves to a thousand things that constantly occupy their attention, while giving their bodies no exercise. This too may seriously hold back their growth. So if, instead of overloading and exhausting their minds in a thousand ways from the start, we let their bodies engage in the constant movement nature seems to demand, it seems likely that they would learn much sooner to walk, act, and provide for their own needs.\n\nd. Finally, Mr. Locke shows at most that a man might have a reason to stay with a woman when she has a child. He does not show at all why the man must have stayed with her before the birth and during the nine months of pregnancy. If he is indifferent to a particular woman throughout those nine months, or if he no longer even knows her, why would he help her after the birth? Why would he help her raise a child that he does not even know is his, and whose birth he neither planned nor expected? Mr. Locke clearly assumes the point at issue. The question is not why a man would stay with a woman after childbirth, but why he would stay with her after conception. Once his appetite is satisfied, a man no longer needs that particular woman, nor does she need that particular man. He has not the least concern about, and perhaps not the least idea of, what will follow from his act. One goes one way and the other goes another. It is unlikely that nine months later they even remember meeting. For one individual to remember another in the way needed to prefer that person as a sexual partner requires, as I show in the text, more development or corruption of human understanding than we can suppose in the animal condition under discussion. Another woman can therefore satisfy the man's new desires just as easily as the woman he has already met. Another man can satisfy the woman as well, assuming she feels the same appetite during pregnancy, which there is good reason to doubt. If in the state of nature a woman no longer feels sexual desire after conceiving a child, an even greater obstacle stands in the way of her union with a man. She then needs neither the man who made her pregnant nor any other. So the man has no reason to seek out the same woman, and the woman has no reason to seek out the same man. Locke's argument therefore collapses. For all his skill in reasoning, this philosopher has made the same mistake as Hobbes and others. They had to explain a fact about the state of nature, that is, a condition in which people lived apart. In it, one man had no reason to stay near any particular man, and people perhaps had no reason even to stay near one another, which is more serious. But these philosophers failed to look past centuries of life in society, times when people always have a reason to stay near one another and one man often has a reason to stay near a particular man or woman.\n\nNote 13\n\nI will certainly not venture into the philosophical reflections one could make about the advantages and disadvantages of this institution of languages. I am not the one who is allowed to challenge common errors, and educated people respect their prejudices too much to put up patiently with my supposed paradoxes. So let those speak who have not been treated as criminals for sometimes daring to side with reason against the crowd. Nothing would be lost from the happiness of the human race if the scourge and confusion of so many languages were driven out, if mortals knew a single art, and if they were free to express anything with signs, movements, and gestures. But as things stand, the animals commonly regarded as brutes seem far better off than we are in this respect, since they communicate their feelings and thoughts without an interpreter more readily, and perhaps more successfully, than any humans can, especially when people speak a foreign language. Is. Vossius, On the Nature and Power of Poetic Rhythm, p.66.\n\nNote 14\n\n### Notes, 6\n\nPlato shows how necessary ideas of separate quantities and their relationships are even in the simplest crafts. He rightly mocks the writers of his day who claimed that Palamedes invented numbers at the siege of Troy. As this philosopher asks, could Agamemnon have been unaware until then of how many legs he had? Clearly, society and the crafts could not have reached the point they had reached by the siege of Troy without people using numbers and arithmetic. But the need to know numbers before learning other things does not make it any easier to imagine their invention. Once we know the words for numbers, we can easily explain what they mean and bring to mind the ideas they represent. To invent them, however, people first had to become familiar, so to speak, with philosophical thinking, even before forming those ideas. They had to practice considering things solely in terms of their essential nature, apart from every other perception. This kind of abstraction is very difficult, very metaphysical, and very unnatural. Yet without it, these ideas could never have been applied from one species or kind to another, and numbers could never have become universal. A wild man could consider his right and left legs separately, or see them together as a pair that he thought of as a single whole, without ever thinking that he had two. An idea that pictures an object for us is one thing; an idea that assigns it a number is another. He would have been even less able to count to five. He could put one hand against the other and notice that his fingers matched exactly, but he would still be far from thinking about their numerical equality. He knew the number of his fingers no better than the number of his hairs. If someone had explained numbers to him and then told him he had as many toes as fingers, he might have been very surprised to compare them and find it true.\n\nNote 15\n\nWe must not confuse amour-propre with self-love. These two passions are very different in nature and effect. Self-love is a natural feeling that leads every animal to look after its own survival. When reason guides it in human beings and pity modifies it, it produces humanity and virtue. Amour-propre is only a relative and artificial feeling that arises in society. It leads each individual to value himself more than anyone else, inspires all the harms people do one another, and is the true source of honor.\n\nWith this distinction clear, I say that amour-propre does not exist in our original condition, the true state of nature. Each person sees himself as the only spectator watching him, the only being in the universe interested in him, and the only judge of his own worth. A feeling rooted in comparisons he cannot make therefore cannot grow in his mind. For the same reason, he cannot feel hatred or a desire for revenge. Those passions can arise only from believing he has been insulted. It is contempt or an intention to harm, not the harm itself, that constitutes an insult. People who do not know how to judge or compare themselves may do each other a great deal of violence when it benefits them, without ever insulting each other. In short, each person sees other human beings much as he would see animals of another species. He may take food from the weaker or give up his own to the stronger, regarding these acts of taking as nothing more than natural events. He feels no arrogance or resentment, only the pain or pleasure of an unsuccessful or successful outcome.\n\nNote 16\n\nIt is extremely remarkable that, after all the years Europeans have spent trying to get the wild peoples of various parts of the world to adopt their way of life, they have not managed to win over even one of them, not even with the help of Christianity. Our missionaries sometimes make them Christians, but never civilized people. Nothing can overcome their firm unwillingness to adopt our customs and live as we do. If these poor wild people are as unhappy as is claimed, what unbelievable failure of judgment makes them consistently refuse to become civilized in imitation of us or learn to live happily among us? Meanwhile, we read in countless places that French people and other Europeans have voluntarily taken refuge among these peoples and spent their whole lives there, unable to leave such a strange way of life. We even see sensible missionaries fondly regretting the calm and innocent days they spent among these much-despised peoples. If the reply is that the wild peoples lack the understanding to judge their condition and ours correctly, I would answer that judging happiness is more a matter of feeling than reason. Besides, the reply can be turned against us even more forcefully. Our ideas are further from the frame of mind needed to grasp why wild peoples like their way of life than their ideas are from the ideas that would let them grasp ours. After observing us a little, they can easily see that all our work has just two aims: for ourselves, the comforts of life, and among others, respect. But how can we imagine the pleasure a wild man takes in spending his life alone in the woods, or fishing, or blowing into a poor flute without ever managing to get a single note from it or caring to learn how?\n\nWild people have been brought to Paris, London, and other cities many times. People eagerly displayed our luxuries, our riches, and all our most useful and curious arts to them. None of it ever stirred anything but blank amazement in them, without the slightest desire to own any of it. Among other cases, I remember the story of a chief of some North Americans who was brought to the court of England about thirty years ago. A thousand things were shown to him in the hope of finding a present he would like, but nothing seemed to interest him. Our weapons seemed heavy and awkward to him, our shoes hurt his feet, our clothes confined him. He rejected everything. At last people noticed that he seemed to enjoy wrapping a wool blanket around his shoulders. “You must at least admit that this item is useful,” they promptly told him. “Yes,” he answered, “it seems almost as good as an animal skin.” He would not even have said that if he had worn both in the rain.\n\nPerhaps I will be told that habit attaches each person to his own way of life and stops wild people from recognizing what is good in ours. On that view, it must seem at least very odd that habit is stronger in keeping wild people fond of their misery than in keeping Europeans content with their happiness. But I can give a reply to this last objection that leaves nothing to argue with. I need not cite all the young wild people whom others have tried in vain to civilize. Nor need I mention the Greenlanders and inhabitants of Iceland whom people tried to raise and feed in Denmark, all of whom died of sadness and despair, either wasting away or drowning at sea while trying to swim home. I will give only one well-attested example for admirers of European civilization to consider.\n\n“All the efforts of the Dutch missionaries at the Cape of Good Hope have never managed to convert a single Hottentot. Van der Stel, governor of the Cape, took one as a child and had him brought up in the principles of Christianity and the practice of European customs. He was dressed in fine clothes and taught several languages, and his progress amply repaid the care spent on his education. The governor had high hopes for his intelligence and sent him to the Indies with a commissioner general, who put him to useful work in the Company's affairs. He returned to the Cape after the commissioner's death. A few days after his return, while visiting some Hottentot relatives, he decided to take off his European finery and put on a sheepskin. He went back to the fort in his new clothing, carrying a bundle of his old clothes. Presenting them to the governor, he made this speech (see the frontispiece): ‘Please understand, sir, that I am giving up this finery forever. I am also giving up the Christian religion for the rest of my life. I have decided to live and die with the religion, ways, and customs of my ancestors. The only favor I ask is that you let me keep the necklace and knife I am wearing. I will keep them out of affection for you.’ Without waiting for Van der Stel's answer, he immediately slipped away and was never seen at the Cape again.” History of Travels, volume 5, p. 175.\n\nNote 17\n\nOne might object that in such disorder, instead of stubbornly slaughtering one another, people would have scattered, if there had been no limits to how far they could go. But to begin with, those limits would at least have been the limits of the world. If we consider the enormous population that results from the state of nature, we will see that the earth in that condition would soon have been filled with people forced to live close together. Besides, they would have scattered if the trouble had come quickly, as a change made overnight. But they were born under the yoke and were already used to bearing it by the time they felt its weight. They contented themselves with waiting for a chance to throw it off. Finally, they were already used to a thousand comforts that forced them to stay together. Scattering was no longer as easy as it had been in the earliest times, when nobody needed anyone else and everyone could decide what to do without waiting for another person's agreement.\n\nNote 18\n\nThe Marshal de V—— used to tell how, during one of his campaigns, an army supplier's outrageous cheating made the army suffer and complain. The marshal scolded him sharply and threatened to have him hanged. “That threat does not concern me,” the swindler boldly answered, “and I am pleased to tell you that no one hangs a man who controls a hundred thousand écus.” “I do not know how it happened,” the marshal would add simply, “but in fact he was not hanged, though he deserved it a hundred times over.”\n\nNote 19\n\nDistributive justice would even rule out the strict equality of the state of nature if that equality could be put into practice in civil society. All members of the state owe it services in proportion to their talents and strength. Citizens, in turn, ought to receive distinction and advantages in proportion to their services. That is how we should understand a passage in which Isocrates praises the earliest Athenians for distinguishing correctly which of two kinds of equality was better. One gives every citizen the same advantages without distinction; the other distributes advantages according to each person's merit. These skilled statesmen, the orator adds, rejected the unjust kind of equality that makes no distinction between bad people and good people. They held firmly to the kind that rewards and punishes each person according to merit. But, first, there has never been any society, however corrupt, that made no distinction between bad people and good people. And when it comes to conduct, the law cannot set a standard exact enough to guide a magistrate. It is therefore very wise for the law to bar the magistrate from judging people and allow him to judge only actions, so that citizens' fates or standing do not depend on his discretion. Only customs as pure as those of the ancient Romans could put up with censors. Tribunals like theirs would soon throw everything into chaos among us. It is up to public opinion to distinguish bad people from good people. The magistrate judges only strict legal rights; the people are the true judge of conduct. On this point they are an honest and even well-informed judge. They can sometimes be misled but never corrupted. Citizens' ranks should therefore be based not on their personal merit, which would let the magistrate apply the law almost at will, but on the real services they give the state, which can be assessed more accurately.","download_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/discours/translations/trn_discours_plain.txt"}],"retex_markdown_url":"https://mouseia.org/api/works/discours/retex.md"}}