Rousseau 5

Being subject therefore to so few causes of sickness, man, in the state

of nature, can have no need of remedies, and still less of physicians:

nor is the human race in this respect worse off than other animals, and

it is easy to learn from hunters whether they meet with many infirm

animals in the course of the chase. It is certain they frequently meet

with such as carry the marks of having been considerably wounded, with

many that have had bones or even limbs broken, yet have been healed

without any other surgical assistance than that of time, or any other

regimen than that of their ordinary life. At the same time their cures

seem not to have been less perfect, for their not having been tortured

by incisions, poisoned with drugs, or wasted by fasting. In short,

however useful medicine, properly administered, may be among us, it is

certain that, if the savage, when he is sick and left to himself, has

nothing to hope but from nature, he has, on the other hand, nothing to

fear but from his disease; which renders his situation often preferable

to our own.



We should beware, therefore, of confounding the savage man with the men

we have daily before our eyes. Nature treats all the animals left to her

care with a predilection that seems to show how jealous she is of that

right. The horse, the cat, the bull, and even the ass are generally of

greater stature, and always more robust, and have more vigour, strength

and courage, when they run wild in the forests than when bred in the

stall. By becoming domesticated, they lose half these advantages; and it

seems as if all our care to feed and treat them well serves only to

deprave them. It is thus with man also: as he becomes sociable and a

slave, he grows weak, timid and servile; his effeminate way of life

totally enervates his strength and courage. To this it may be added that

there is still a greater difference between savage and civilised man,

than between wild and tame beasts: for men and brutes having been

treated alike by nature, the several conveniences in which men indulge

themselves still more than they do their beasts, are so many additional

causes of their deeper degeneracy.



It is not therefore so great a misfortune to these primitive men, nor so

great an obstacle to their preservation, that they go naked, have no

dwellings and lack all the superfluities which we think so necessary. If

their skins are not covered with hair, they have no need of such

covering in warm climates; and, in cold countries, they soon learn to

appropriate the skins of the beasts they have overcome. If they have but

two legs to run with, they have two arms to defend themselves with, and

provide for their wants. Their children are slowly and with difficulty

taught to walk; but their mothers are able to carry them with ease; an

advantage which other animals lack, as the mother, if pursued, is forced

either to abandon her young, or to regulate her pace by theirs. Unless,

in short, we suppose a singular and fortuitous concurrence of

circumstances of which I shall speak later, and which would be unlikely

to exist, it is plain in every state of the case, that the man who first

made himself clothes or a dwelling was furnishing himself with things

not at all necessary; for he had till then done without them, and there

is no reason why he should not have been able to put up in manhood with

the same kind of life as had been his in infancy.



Solitary, indolent, and perpetually accompanied by danger, the savage

cannot but be fond of sleep; his sleep too must be light, like that of

the animals, which think but little and may be said to slumber all the

time they do not think. Self-preservation being his chief and almost

sole concern, he must exercise most those faculties which are most

concerned with attack or defence, either for overcoming his prey, or for

preventing him from becoming the prey of other animals. On the other

hand, those organs which are perfected only by softness and sensuality

will remain in a gross and imperfect state, incompatible with any sort

of delicacy; so that, his senses being divided on this head, his touch

and taste will be extremely coarse, his sight, hearing and smell

exceedingly fine and subtle. Such in general is the animal condition,

and such, according to the narratives of travellers, is that of most

savage nations. It is therefore no matter for surprise that the

Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope distinguish ships at sea, with the

naked eye, at as great a distance as the Dutch can do with their

telescopes; or that the savages of America should trace the Spaniards,

by their smell, as well as the best dogs could have done; or that these

barbarous peoples feel no pain in going naked, or that they use large

quantities of piemento with their food, and drink the strongest European

liquors like water.



Hitherto I have considered merely the physical man; let us now take a

view of him on his metaphysical and moral side.



I see nothing in any animal but an ingenious machine, to which nature

hath given senses to wind itself up, and to guard itself, to a certain

degree, against anything that might tend to disorder or destroy it. I

perceive exactly the same things in the human machine, with this

difference, that in the operations of the brute, nature is the sole

agent, whereas man has some share in his own operations, in his

character as a free agent. The one chooses and refuses by instinct, the

other from an act of free-will: hence the brute cannot deviate from the

rule prescribed to it, even when it would be advantageous for it to do

so; and, on the contrary, man frequently deviates from such rules to his

own prejudice. Thus a pigeon would be starved to death by the side of a

dish of the choicest meats, and a cat on a heap of fruit or grain;

though it is certain that either might find nourishment in the foods

which it thus rejects with disdain, did it think of trying them. Hence

it is that dissolute men run into excesses which bring on fevers and

death; because the mind depraves the senses, and the will continues to

speak when nature is silent.



Every animal has ideas, since it has senses; it even combines those

ideas in a certain degree; and it is only in degree that man differs, in

this respect, from the brute. Some philosophers have even maintained

that there is a greater difference between one man and another than

between some men and some beasts. It is not, therefore, so much the

understanding that constitutes the specific difference between the man

and the brute, as the human quality of free-agency. Nature lays her

commands on every animal, and the brute obeys her voice. Man receives

the same impulsion, but at the same time knows himself at liberty to

acquiesce or resist: and it is particularly in his consciousness of this

liberty that the spirituality of his soul is displayed. For physics may

explain, in some measure, the mechanism of the senses and the formation

of ideas; but in the power of willing or rather of choosing, and in the

feeling of this power, nothing is to be found but acts which are purely

spiritual and wholly inexplicable by the laws of mechanism.



However, even if the difficulties attending all these questions should

still leave room for difference in this respect between men and brutes,

there is another very specific quality which distinguishes them, and

which will admit of no dispute. This is the faculty of self-improvement,

which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of

our faculties, and is inherent in the species as in the individual:

whereas a brute is, at the end of a few months, all he will ever be

during his whole life, and his species, at the end of a thousand years,

exactly what it was the first year of that thousand. Why is man alone

liable to grow into a dotard? Is it not because he returns, in this, to

his primitive state; and that, while the brute, which has acquired

nothing and has therefore nothing to lose, still retains the force of

instinct, man, who loses, by age or accident, all that his

perfectibility had enabled him to gain, falls by this means lower than

the brutes themselves? It would be melancholy, were we forced to admit

that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all

human misfortunes; that it is this which, in time, draws man out of his

original state, in which he would have spent his days insensibly in

peace and innocence; that it is this faculty, which, successively

producing in different ages his discoveries and his errors, his vices

and his virtues, makes him at length a tyrant both over himself and over

nature.[1] It would be shocking to be obliged to regard as a benefactor

the man who first suggested to the Oroonoko Indians the use of the

boards they apply to the temples of their children, which secure to them

some part at least of their imbecility and original happiness.



Savage man, left by nature solely to the direction of instinct, or

rather indemnified for what he may lack by faculties capable at first of

supplying its place, and afterwards of raising him much above it, must

accordingly begin with purely animal functions: thus seeing and feeling

must be his first condition, which would be common to him and all other

animals. To will, and not to will, to desire and to fear, must be the

first, and almost the only operations of his soul, till new

circumstances occasion new developments of his faculties.



Whatever moralists may hold, the human understanding is greatly indebted

to the passions, which, it is universally allowed, are also much

indebted to the understanding. It is by the activity of the passions

that our reason is improved; for we desire knowledge only because we

wish to enjoy; and it is impossible to conceive any reason why a person

who has neither fears nor desires should give himself the trouble of

reasoning. The passions, again, originate in our wants, and their

progress depends on that of our knowledge; for we cannot desire or fear

anything, except from the idea we have of it, or from the simple impulse

of nature. Now savage man, being destitute of every species of

intelligence, can have no passions save those of the latter kind: his

desires never go beyond his physical wants. The only goods he recognises

in the universe are food, a female, and sleep: the only evils he fears

are pain and hunger. I say pain, and not death: for no animal can know

what it is to die; the knowledge of death and its terrors being one of

the first acquisitions made by man in departing from an animal state.



It would be easy, were it necessary, to support this opinion by facts,

and to show that, in all the nations of the world, the progress of the

understanding has been exactly proportionate to the wants which the

peoples had received from nature, or been subjected to by circumstances,

and in consequence to the passions that induced them to provide for

those necessities. I might instance the arts, rising up in Egypt and

expanding with the inundation of the Nile. I might follow their progress

into Greece, where they took root afresh, grew up and lowered to the

skies, among the rocks and sands of Attica, without being able to

germinate on the fertile banks of the Eurotas: I might observe that in

general, the people of the North are more industrious than those of the

South, because they cannot get on so well without being so: as if nature

wanted to equalise matters by giving their understandings the fertility

she had refused to their soil.



But who does not see, without recurring to the uncertain testimony of

history, that everything seems to remove from savage man both the

temptation and the means of changing his condition? His imagination

paints no pictures; his heart makes no demands on him. His few wants are

so readily supplied, and he is so far from having the knowledge which is

needful to make him want more, that he can have neither foresight nor

curiosity. The face of nature becomes indifferent to him as it grows

familiar. He sees in it always the same order, the same successions: he

has not understanding enough to wonder at the greatest miracles; nor is

it in his mind that we can expect to find that philosophy man needs, if

he is to know how to notice for once what he sees every day. His soul,

which nothing disturbs, is wholly wrapped up in the feeling of its

present existence, without any idea of the future, however near at hand;

while his projects, as limited as his views, hardly extend to the close

of day. Such, even at present, is the extent of the native Caribbean's

foresight: he will improvidently sell you his cotton-bed in the morning,

and come crying in the evening to buy it again, not having foreseen he

would want it again the next night.



The more we reflect on this subject, the greater appears the distance

between pure sensation and the most simple knowledge: it is impossible

indeed to conceive how a man, by his own powers alone, without the aid

of communication and the spur of necessity, could have bridged so great

a gap. How many ages may have elapsed before mankind were in a position

to behold any other fire than that of the heavens. What a multiplicity

of chances must have happened to teach them the commonest uses of that

element! How often must they have let it out before they acquired the

art of reproducing it? and how often may not such a secret have died

with him who had discovered it? What shall we say of agriculture, an art

which requires so much labour and foresight, which is so dependent on

others that it is plain it could only be practised in a society which

had at least begun, and which does not serve so much to draw the means

of subsistence from the earth -- for these it would produce of itself --

but to compel it to produce what is most to our taste? But let us

suppose that men had so multiplied that the natural produce of the earth

was no longer sufficient for their support; a supposition, by the way,

which would prove such a life to be very advantageous for the human

race; let us suppose that, without forges or workshops, the instruments

of husbandry had dropped from the sky into the hands of savages; that

they had overcome their natural aversion to continual labour; that they

had learnt so much foresight for their needs; that they had divined how

to cultivate the earth, to sow grain and plant trees; that they had

discovered the arts of grinding corn, and of setting the grape to

ferment -- all being things that must have been taught them by the gods,

since it is not to be conceived how they could discover them for

themselves -- yet after all this, what man among them would be so absurd

as to take the trouble of cultivating a field, which might be stripped

of its crop by the first comer, man or beast, that might take a liking

to it; and how should each of them resolve to pass his life in wearisome

labour, when, the more necessary to him the reward of his labour might

be, the surer he would be of not getting it? In a word, how could such a

situation induce men to cultivate the earth, till it was regularly

parcelled out among them; that is to say, till the state of nature had

been abolished?



Were we to suppose savage man as trained in the art of thinking as

philosophers make him; were we, like them, to suppose him a very

philosopher capable of investigating the sublimest truths, and of

forming, by highly abstract chains of reasoning, maxims of reason and

justice, deduced from the love of order in general, or the known will of

his Creator; in a word, were we to suppose him as intelligent and

enlightened, as he must have been, and is in fact found to have been,

dull and stupid, what advantage would accrue to the species, from all

such metaphysics, which could not be communicated by one to another, but

must end with him who made them? What progress could be made by mankind,

while dispersed in the woods among other animals? and how far could men

improve or mutually enlighten one another, when, having no fixed

habitation, and no need of one another's assistance, the same persons

hardly met twice in their lives, and perhaps then, without knowing one

another or speaking together?



Let it be considered how many ideas we owe to the use of speech; how far

grammar exercises the understanding and facilitates its operations. Let

us reflect on the inconceivable pains and the infinite space of time

that the first invention of languages must have cost. To these

reflections add what preceded, and then judge how many thousand ages

must have elapsed in the successive development in the human mind of

those operations of which it is capable.



I shall here take the liberty for a moment, of considering the

difficulties of the origin of languages, on which subject I might

content myself with a simple repetition of the Abbé Condillac's

investigations, as they fully confirm my system, and perhaps even first

suggested it. But it is plain, from the manner in which this philosopher

solves the difficulties he himself raises, concerning the origin of

arbitrary signs, that he assumes what I question, viz., that a kind of

society must already have existed among the first inventors of language.

While I refer, therefore, to his observations on this head, I think it

right to give my own, in order to exhibit the same difficulties in a

light adapted to my subject. The first which presents itself is to

conceive how language can have become necessary; for as there was no

communication among men and no need for any, we can neither conceive the

necessity of this invention, nor the possibility of it, if it was not

somehow indispensable. I might affirm, with many others, that languages

arose in the domestic intercourse between parents and their children.

But this expedient would not obviate the difficulty, and would besides

involve the blunder made by those who, in reasoning on the state of

nature, always import into it ideas gathered in a state of society. Thus

they constantly consider families as living together under one roof, and

the individuals of each as observing among themselves a union as

intimate and permanent as that which exists among us, where so many

common interests unite them: whereas, in this primitive state, men had

neither houses, nor huts, nor any kind of property whatever; every one

lived where he could, seldom for more than a single night; the sexes

united without design, as accident, opportunity or inclination brought

them together, nor had they any great need of words to communicate their

designs to each other; and they parted with the same indifference. The

mother gave suck to her children at first for her own sake; and

afterwards, when habit had made them dear, for theirs: but as soon as

they were strong enough to go in search of their own food, they forsook

her of their own accord; and, as they had hardly any other method of not

losing one another than that of remaining continually within sight, they

soon became quite incapable of recognising one another when they

happened to meet again. It is farther to be observed that the child,

having all his wants to explain, and of course more to say to his mother

than the mother could have to say to him, must have borne the brunt of

the task of invention, and the language he used would be of his own

device, so that the number of languages would be equal to that of the

individuals speaking them, and the variety would be increased by the

vagabond and roving life they led, which would not give time for any

idiom to become constant. For to say that the mother dictated to her

child the words he was to use in asking her for one thing or another, is

an explanation of how languages already formed are taught, but by no

means explains how languages were originally formed.



We will suppose, however, that this first difficulty is obviated. Let us

for a moment then take ourselves as being on this side of the vast space

which must lie between a pure state of nature and that in which

languages had become necessary, and, admitting their necessity, let us

inquire how they could first be established. Here we have a new and

worse difficulty to grapple with; for if men need speech to learn to

think, they must have stood in much greater need of the art of thinking,

to be able to invent that of speaking. And though we might conceive how

the articulate sounds of the voice came to be taken as the conventional

interpreters of our ideas, it would still remain for us to inquire what

could have been the interpreters of this convention for those ideas,

which, answering to no sensible objects, could not be indicated either

by gesture or voice; so that we can hardly form any tolerable

conjectures about the origin of this art of communicating our thoughts

and establishing a correspondence between minds: an art so sublime, that

far distant as it is from its origin, philosophers still behold it at

such an immeasurable distance from perfection, that there is none rash

enough to affirm it will ever reach it, even though the revolutions time

necessarily produces were suspended in its favour, though prejudice

should be banished from our academies or condemned to silence, and those

learned societies should devote themselves uninterruptedly for whole

ages to this thorny question.



The first language of mankind, the most universal and vivid, in a word

the only language man needed, before he had occasion to exert his

eloquence to persuade assembled multitudes, was the simple cry of

nature. But as this was excited only by a sort of instinct on urgent

occasions, to implore assistance in case of danger, or relief in case of

suffering, it could be of little use in the ordinary course of life, in

which more moderate feelings prevail. When the ideas of men began to

expand and multiply, and closer communication took place among them,

they strove to invent more numerous signs and a more copious language.

They multiplied the inflections of the voice, and added gestures, which

are in their own nature more expressive, and depend less for their

meaning on a prior determination. Visible and movable objects were

therefore expressed by gestures, and audible ones by imitative sounds:

but, as hardly anything can be indicated by gestures, except objects

actually present or easily described, and visible actions; as they are

not universally useful -- for darkness or the interposition of a material

object destroys their efficacy -- and as besides they rather request than

secure our attention; men at length bethought themselves of substituting

for them the articulate sounds of the voice, which, without bearing the

same relation to any particular ideas, are better calculated to express

them all, as conventional signs. Such an institution could only be made

by common consent, and must have been effected in a manner not very easy

for men whose gross organs had not been accustomed to any such exercise.

It is also in itself still more difficult to conceive, since such a

common agreement must have had motives, and speech seems to have been

highly necessary to establish the use of it.