Part One, 2

Other 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.

With 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.

Nakedness, 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.

Alone, 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.

So far I have considered only physical man; let us now try to view him from the metaphysical and moral side.

In 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.

Every 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.

But 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.

Savage 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.

Whatever 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.

There 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.

With 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.

So 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.

Alone, 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.

So far I have considered only the physical human being. Let us now try to consider the metaphysical and moral side.

In 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.

Every 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.

Even 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.

Nature 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.

Whatever 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.