Rousseau 7

With passions so little active, and so good a curb, men, being rather

wild than wicked, and more intent to guard themselves against the

mischief that might be done them, than to do mischief to others, were by

no means subject to very perilous dissensions. They maintained no kind

of intercourse with one another, and were consequently strangers to

vanity, deference, esteem and contempt; they had not the least idea of

meum and tuum, and no true conception of justice; they looked upon every

violence to which they were subjected, rather as an injury that might

easily be repaired than as a crime that ought to be punished; and they

never thought of taking revenge, unless perhaps mechanically and on the

spot, as a dog will sometimes bite the stone which is thrown at him.

Their quarrels therefore would seldom have very bloody consequences; for

the subject of them would be merely the question of subsistence. But I

am aware of one greater danger, which remains to be noticed.



Of the passions that stir the heart of man, there is one which makes the

sexes necessary to each other, and is extremely ardent and impetuous; a

terrible passion that braves danger, surmounts all obstacles, and in its

transports seems calculated to bring destruction on the human race which

it is really destined to preserve. What must become of men who are left

to this brutal and boundless rage, without modesty, without shame, and

daily upholding their amours at the price of their blood?



It must, in the first place, be allowed that, the more violent the

passions are, the more are laws necessary to keep them under restraint.

But, setting aside the inadequacy of laws to effect this purpose, which

is evident from the crimes and disorders to which these passions daily

give rise among us, we should do well to inquire if these evils did not

spring up with the laws themselves; for in this case, even if the laws

were capable of repressing such evils, it is the least that could be

expected from them, that they should check a mischief which would not

have arisen without them.



Let us begin by distinguishing between the physical and moral

ingredients in the feeling of love. The physical part of love is that

general desire which urges the sexes to union with each other. The moral

part is that which determines and fixes this desire exclusively upon one

particular object; or at least gives it a greater degree of energy

toward the object thus preferred. It is easy to see that the moral part

of love is a factitious feeling, born of social usage, and enhanced by

the women with much care and cleverness, to establish their empire, and

put in power the sex which ought to obey. This feeling, being founded on

certain ideas of beauty and merit which a savage is not in a position to

acquire, and on comparisons which he is incapable of making, must be for

him almost non-existent; for, as his mind cannot form abstract ideas of

proportion and regularity, so his heart is not susceptible of the

feelings of love and admiration, which are even insensibly produced by

the application of these ideas. He follows solely the character nature

has implanted in him, and not tastes which he could never have acquired;

so that every woman equally answers his purpose.



Men in a state of nature being confined merely to what is physical in

love, and fortunate enough to be ignorant of those excellences, which

whet the appetite while they increase the difficulty of gratifying it,

must be subject to fewer and less violent fits of passion, and

consequently fall into fewer and less violent disputes. The imagination,

which causes such ravages among us, never speaks to the heart of

savages, who quietly await the impulses of nature, yield to them

involuntarily, with more pleasure than ardour, and, their wants once

satisfied, lose the desire. It is therefore incontestable that love, as

well as all other passions, must have acquired in society that glowing

impetuosity, which makes it so often fatal to mankind. And it is the

more absurd to represent savages as continually cutting one another's

throats to indulge their brutality, because this opinion is directly

contrary to experience; the Caribbeans, who have as yet least of all

deviated from the state of nature, being in fact the most peaceable of

people in their amours, and the least subject to jealousy, though they

live in a hot climate which seems always to inflame the passions.



With regard to the inferences that might be drawn, in the case of

several species of animals, the males of which fill our poultry-yards

with blood and slaughter, or in spring make the forests resound with

their quarrels over their females; we must begin by excluding all those

species, in which nature has plainly established, in the comparative

power of the sexes, relations different from those which exist among us:

thus we can base no conclusion about men on the habits of fighting

cocks. In those species where the proportion is better observed, these

battles must be entirely due to the scarcity of females in comparison

with males; or, what amounts to the same thing, to the intervals during

which the female constantly refuses the advances of the male: for if

each female admits the male but during two months in the year, it is the

same as if the number of females were five-sixths less. Now, neither of

these two cases is applicable to the human species, in which the number

of females usually exceeds that of males, and among whom it has never

been observed, even among savages, that the females have, like those of

other animals, their stated times of passion and indifference. Moreover,

in several of these species, the individuals all take fire at once, and

there comes a fearful moment of universal passion, tumult and disorder

among them; a scene which is never beheld in the human species, whose

love is not thus seasonal. We must not then conclude from the combats of

such animals for the enjoyment of the females, that the case would be

the same with mankind in a state of nature: and, even if we drew such a

conclusion, we see that such contests do not exterminate other kinds of

animals, and we have no reason to think they would be more fatal to

ours. It is indeed clear that they would do still less mischief than is

the case in a state of society; especially in those countries in which,

morals being still held in some repute, the jealousy of lovers and the

vengeance of husbands are the daily cause of duels, murders, and even

worse crimes; where the obligation of eternal fidelity only occasions

adultery, and the very laws of honour and continence necessarily

increase debauchery and lead to the multiplication of abortions.



Let us conclude then that man in a state of nature, wandering up and

down the forests, without industry, without speech, and without home, an

equal stranger to war and to all ties, neither standing in need of his

fellow-creatures nor having any desire to hurt them, and perhaps even

not distinguishing them one from another; let us conclude that, being

self-sufficient and subject to so few passions, he could have no

feelings or knowledge but such as befitted his situation; that he felt

only his actual necessities, and disregarded everything he did not think

himself immediately concerned to notice, and that his understanding made

no greater progress than his vanity. If by accident he made any

discovery, he was the less able to communicate it to others, as he did

not know even his own children. Every art would necessarily perish with

its inventor, where there was no kind of education among men, and

generations succeeded generations without the least advance; when, all

setting out from the same point, centuries must have elapsed in the

barbarism of the first ages; when the race was already old, and man

remained a child.



If I have expatiated at such length on this supposed primitive state, it

is because I had so many ancient errors and inveterate prejudices to

eradicate, and therefore thought it incumbent on me to dig down to their

very root, and show, by means of a true picture of the state of nature,

how far even the natural inequalities of mankind are from having that

reality and influence which modern writers suppose.



It is in fact easy to see that many of the differences which distinguish

men are merely the effect of habit and the different methods of life men

adopt in society. Thus a robust or delicate constitution, and the

strength or weakness attaching to it, are more frequently the effects of

a hardy or effeminate method of education than of the original endowment

of the body. It is the same with the powers of the mind; for education

not only makes a difference between such as are cultured and such as are

not, but even increases the differences which exist among the former, in

proportion to their respective degrees of culture: as the distance

between a giant and a dwarf on the same road increases with every step

they take. If we compare the prodigious diversity, which obtains in the

education and manner of life of the various orders of men in the state

of society, with the uniformity and simplicity of animal and savage

life, in which every one lives on the same kind of food and in exactly

the same manner, and does exactly the same things, it is easy to

conceive how much less the difference between man and man must be in a

state of nature than in a state of society, and how greatly the natural

inequality of mankind must be increased by the inequalities of social

institutions.



But even if nature really affected, in the distribution of her gifts,

that partiality which is imputed to her, what advantage would the

greatest of her favourites derive from it, to the detriment of others,

in a state that admits of hardly any kind of relation between them?

Where there is no love, of what advantage is beauty? Of what use is wit

to those who do not converse, or cunning to those who have no business

with others? I hear it constantly repeated that, in such a state, the

strong would oppress the weak; but what is here meant by oppression?

Some, it is said, would violently domineer over others, who would groan

under a servile submission to their caprices. This indeed is exactly

what I observe to be the case among us; but I do not see how it can be

inferred of men in a state of nature, who could not easily be brought to

conceive what we mean by dominion and servitude. One man, it is true,

might seize the fruits which another had gathered, the game he had

killed, or the cave he had chosen for shelter; but how would he ever be

able to exact obedience, and what ties of dependence could there be

among men without possessions? If, for instance, I am driven from one

tree, I can go to the next; if I am disturbed in one place, what hinders

me from going to another? Again, should I happen to meet with a man so

much stronger than myself, and at the same time so depraved, so

indolent, and so barbarous, as to compel me to provide for his

sustenance while he himself remains idle; he must take care not to have

his eyes off me for a single moment; he must bind me fast before he goes

to sleep, or I shall certainly either knock him on the head or make my

escape. That is to say, he must in such a case voluntarily expose

himself to much greater trouble than he seeks to avoid, or can give me.

After all this, let him be off his guard ever so little; let him but

turn his head aside at any sudden noise, and I shall be instantly twenty

paces off, lost in the forest, and, my fetters burst asunder, he would

never see me again.



Without my expatiating thus uselessly on these details, every one must

see that as the bonds of servitude are formed merely by the mutual

dependence of men on one another and the reciprocal needs that unite

them, it is impossible to make any man a slave, unless he be first

reduced to a situation in which he cannot do without the help of others:

and, since such a situation does not exist in a state of nature, every

one is there his own master, and the law of the strongest is of no

effect.



Having proved that the inequality of mankind is hardly felt, and that

its influence is next to nothing in a state of nature, I must next show

its origin and trace its progress in the successive developments of the

human mind. Having shown that human perfectibility, the social virtues,

and the other faculties which natural man potentially possessed, could

never develop of themselves, but must require the fortuitous concurrence

of many foreign causes that might never arise, and without which he

would have remained for ever in his primitive condition, I must now

collect and consider the different accidents which may have improved the

human understanding while depraving the species, and made man wicked

while making him sociable; so as to bring him and the world from that

distant period to the point at which we now behold them.



I confess that, as the events I am going to describe might have happened

in various ways, I have nothing to determine my choice but conjectures:

but such conjectures become reasons, when they are the most probable

that can be drawn from the nature of things, and the only means of

discovering the truth. The consequences, however, which I mean to deduce

will not be barely conjectural; as, on the principles just laid down, it

would be impossible to form any other theory that would not furnish the

same results, and from which I could not draw the same conclusions.



This will be a sufficient apology for my not dwelling on the manner in

which the lapse of time compensates for the little probability in the

events; on the surprising power of trivial causes, when their action is

constant; on the impossibility, on the one hand, of destroying certain

hypotheses, though on the other we cannot give them the certainty of

known matters of fact; on its being within the province of history, when

two facts are given as real, and have to be connected by a series of

intermediate facts, which are unknown or supposed to be so, to supply

such facts as may connect them; and on its being in the province of

philosophy when history is silent, to determine similar facts to serve

the same end; and lastly, on the influence of similarity, which, in the

case of events, reduces the facts to a much smaller number of different

classes than is commonly imagined. It is enough for me to offer these

hints to the consideration of my judges, and to have so arranged that

the general reader has no need to consider them at all.



THE SECOND PART



THE first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself

of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him,

was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and

murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have

saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and

crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are

undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all,

and the earth itself to nobody." But there is great probability that

things had then already come to such a pitch, that they could no longer

continue as they were; for the idea of property depends on many prior

ideas, which could only be acquired successively, and cannot have been

formed all at once in the human mind. Mankind must have made very

considerable progress, and acquired considerable knowledge and industry

which they must also have transmitted and increased from age to age,

before they arrived at this last point of the state of nature. Let us

then go farther back, and endeavour to unify under a single point of

view that slow succession of events and discoveries in the most natural

order.



Man's first feeling was that of his own existence, and his first care

that of self-preservation. The produce of the earth furnished him with

all he needed, and instinct told him how to use it. Hunger and other

appetites made him at various times experience various modes of

existence; and among these was one which urged him to propagate his

species -- a blind propensity that, having nothing to do with the heart,

produced a merely animal act. The want once gratified, the two sexes

knew each other no more; and even the offspring was nothing to its

mother, as soon as it could do without her.



Such was the condition of infant man; the life of an animal limited at

first to mere sensations, and hardly profiting by the gifts nature

bestowed on him, much less capable of entertaining a thought of forcing

anything from her. But difficulties soon presented themselves, and it

became necessary to learn how to surmount them: the height of the trees,

which prevented him from gathering their fruits, the competition of

other animals desirous of the same fruits, and the ferocity of those who

needed them for their own preservation, all obliged him to apply himself

to bodily exercises. He had to be active, swift of foot, and vigorous in

fight. Natural weapons, stones and sticks, were easily found: he learnt

to surmount the obstacles of nature, to contend in case of necessity

with other animals, and to dispute for the means of subsistence even

with other men, or to indemnify himself for what he was forced to give

up to a stronger.



In proportion as the human race grew more numerous, men's cares

increased. The difference of soils, climates and seasons, must have

introduced some differences into their manner of living. Barren years,

long and sharp winters, scorching summers which parched the fruits of

the earth, must have demanded a new industry. On the seashore and the

banks of rivers, they invented the hook and line, and became fishermen

and eaters of fish. In the forests they made bows and arrows, and became

huntsmen and warriors. In cold countries they clothed themselves with

the skins of the beasts they had slain. The lightning, a volcano, or

some lucky chance acquainted them with fire, a new resource against the

rigours of winter: they next learned how to preserve this element, then

how to reproduce it, and finally how to prepare with it the flesh of

animals which before they had eaten raw.