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Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind-Jean - Jacques Rousseau · Bhagavad Gita

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Speaker 1: Section one of a discourse on inequality by Jean Jacques Rousseau.
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Speaker 1: This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
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Speaker 1: the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please
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Speaker 1: visit LibriVox dot org. This is a reading by Eric
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Speaker 1: Jonas A discourse upon the origin and the foundation of
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Speaker 1: the inequality among Mankind by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Introductory note.
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Speaker 1: Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva June twenty eighth,
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Speaker 1: seventeen twelve, the son of a watchmaker of French origin.
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Speaker 1: His education was irregular, and though he tried many professions,
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Speaker 1: including engraving, music and teaching, he found it difficult to
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Speaker 1: support himself in any of them. The discovery of his
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Speaker 1: talent as a writer came with the winning of a
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Speaker 1: prize offered by the Academy of Dijon for a discourse
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Speaker 1: on the question whether the progress of the sciences and
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Speaker 1: of letters has tended to corrupt or to elevate morals.
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Speaker 1: He argued so brilliantly that the tendency of civilization was
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Speaker 1: degrading that he became at once famous. The discourse here
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Speaker 1: printed on the causes of inequality among Men was written
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Speaker 1: in a similar competition. He now concentrated his powers upon literature,
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Speaker 1: producing two novels, The New Heloise, the forerunner and parent
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Speaker 1: of endless sentimental and picturesque fictions, and A Meal Or
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Speaker 1: on Education, a work which has had enormous influence on
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Speaker 1: the theory and practice of pedagogy down to our own time,
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Speaker 1: and in which the Savoyard Vicar appears, who is used
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Speaker 1: as the mouthpiece for Rousseau's own religious ideas. The Social
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Speaker 1: Contract seventeen sixty two elaborated the doctrine of the discourse
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Speaker 1: on inequality, both historically and philosophically. It is unsound, but
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Speaker 1: it was the chief literary source of the enthusiasm for liberty, fraternity,
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Speaker 1: and equality which inspired the leaders of the French Revolution,
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Speaker 1: and its effects passed far beyond France. His most famous work,
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Speaker 1: The Confessions, was published after his death. This book is
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Speaker 1: a mine of information as to his life, but it
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Speaker 1: is far from trustworthy, and the picture it gives of
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Speaker 1: the author's personality and conduct, though painted in such a
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Speaker 1: way as to make it absorbingly interesting, is often unpleasing
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Speaker 1: in the highest degree. But it is one of the
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Speaker 1: great autobiographies of the world. During Rousseau's later years, he
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Speaker 1: was the victim of the delusion of persecution, and although
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Speaker 1: he was protected by a succession of good friends, he
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Speaker 1: came to distrust and quarrel with each in turn. He
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Speaker 1: died at Ermenonville, near Paris, July second, seventeen seventy eight.
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Speaker 1: The most widely influential French writer of his age. The
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Speaker 1: Savoyard Vicar and his profession of faith are introduced into
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Speaker 1: a meal, not according to the author, because he wishes
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Speaker 1: to exhibit his principles as those which should be taught,
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Speaker 1: but to give an example of the way in which
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Speaker 1: religious matters should be discussed with the young. Nevertheless, it
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Speaker 1: is universally recognized that these opinions are Rousseau's own, and represent,
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Speaker 1: in short form, his characteristic attitude towards religious belief. The
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Speaker 1: Vicar himself is believed to combine the traits of two
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Speaker 1: Savoyard priests whom Rousseau knew in his youth. The more
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Speaker 1: important was the abbey game, whom he had known at Turin,
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Speaker 1: the other the abbey Gatier, who had taught him at Annecy.
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Speaker 1: End of introductory note. Question proposed by the Academy of Dijon,
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Speaker 1: what is the origin of the inequality among mankind? And
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Speaker 1: whether such inequality is authorized by the law of nature?
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Speaker 1: A discourse upon the origin and the foundation of the
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Speaker 1: inequality among mankind tis of man I am to speak.
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Speaker 1: And the very question and answer to which I am
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Speaker 1: to speak of him sufficiently informs me that I am
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Speaker 1: going to speak to men, For to those alone who
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Speaker 1: are not afraid of honoring truth, it belongs to propose
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Speaker 1: discussions of this kind. I shall therefore maintain with confidence
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Speaker 1: the cause of mankind before the sages who invite me
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Speaker 1: to stand up in its defense. And I shall think
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Speaker 1: myself happy if I can but behave in a manner
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Speaker 1: not unworthy of my subject and of my judges. I
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Speaker 1: conceive two species of inequality among men, one which I
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Speaker 1: call natural or physical inequality, because it is established by
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Speaker 1: nature and consists in the differences of age, health, bodily strength,
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Speaker 1: and the qualities of the mind or of the soul.
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Speaker 1: The other, which may be termed moral or political inequality,
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Speaker 1: because it depends on a kind of convention and is
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Speaker 1: established or at least authorized by the common consent of mankind.
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Speaker 1: This species of inequality consists in the different privileges which
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Speaker 1: some men enjoy to the prejudice of others, such as
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Speaker 1: that of being richer, more honored, more powerful, and even
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Speaker 1: that of exacting obedience from them. It were absurd to
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Speaker 1: ask what is the cause of natural inequality? Seeing the
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Speaker 1: bare definition of natural inequality answers the question. It would
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Speaker 1: be more absurd still to inquire if there might not
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Speaker 1: be some essential connection between the two species of inequality,
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Speaker 1: as it would be asking, in other words, if those
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Speaker 1: who command are necessarily better men than those who obey,
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Speaker 1: and of strength of body or mind, wisdom or virtue
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Speaker 1: are always to be found in individuals in the same
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Speaker 1: proportion with power or riches, a question fit perhaps to
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Speaker 1: be discussed by slaves in the hearing of their masters,
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Speaker 1: but unbecoming free and reasonable beings in quest of truth.
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Speaker 1: What therefore is precisely the subject of this discourse. It
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Speaker 1: is to point out, in the progress of things, that moment,
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Speaker 1: when right, taking place of violence, nature became subject to
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Speaker 1: law to display that chain of surprising events, in consequence
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Speaker 1: of which the strong submitted to serve the weak, and
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Speaker 1: the people to purchase imaginary ease at the expense of
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Speaker 1: real happiness. The philosophers who have examined the foundations of
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Speaker 1: society have every one of them perceived the necessity of
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Speaker 1: tracing it back to a state of nature. But not
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Speaker 1: one of them has ever arrived there. Some of them
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Speaker 1: have not scrupled to attribute to man in that state
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Speaker 1: the ideas of justice and injustice, without troubling their heads
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Speaker 1: to prove that he really must have had such ideas,
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Speaker 1: or even that such ideas were useful to him. Others
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Speaker 1: have spoken of the natural right of every man to
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Speaker 1: keep what belongs to him, without letting us know what
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Speaker 1: they meant by the word belong. Others, without further ceremony,
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Speaker 1: ascribing to the strongest an authority over the weakest, have
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Speaker 1: immediately struck out government, without thinking of the time requisite
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Speaker 1: for men to form any notion of the things signified
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Speaker 1: by the words authority in government. All of them, in fine,
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Speaker 1: constantly harping on wants, avidity, oppression, and desires and pride,
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Speaker 1: have transferred to the state of nature ideas picked up
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Speaker 1: in the bosom of society. In speaking of savages they
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Speaker 1: have described citizens. Nay, few of our own writers seem
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Speaker 1: to have so much as doubted that a state of
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Speaker 1: nature did once actually exist, though plainly appears by sacred history,
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Speaker 1: that even the first man, immediately furnished as he was
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Speaker 1: by God himself, with both instructions and precepts, never lived
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Speaker 1: in that state, And that, if we give to the
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Speaker 1: books of Moses that credit which every Christian philosopher ought
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Speaker 1: to give to them, we must deny that even before
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Speaker 1: the deluge, such a state ever existed among men, unless
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Speaker 1: they fell into it by some extraordinary event, paradox very
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Speaker 1: difficult to maintain and altogether impossible to prove. Let us
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Speaker 1: begin therefore by laying aside facts, for they do not
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Speaker 1: affect the question. The researches in which we may engage
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Speaker 1: on this occasion are not to be taken for historical truths,
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Speaker 1: but merely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings, fitter to illustrate
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Speaker 1: the nature of things than to show their true origin,
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Speaker 1: like those systems which our naturalists daily make of the
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Speaker 1: formation of the world. Religion commands us to believe that men,
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Speaker 1: having been drawn by God himself out of a state
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Speaker 1: of nature, are unequal, because it is his pleasure they
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Speaker 1: should be so. But religion does not forbid us to
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Speaker 1: draw conjectures solely from the nature of man considered in itself,
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Speaker 1: and from that of the beings which surround him, concerning
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Speaker 1: the fate of mankind had they been left to themselves.
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Speaker 1: This is then the question I am to answer, the
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Speaker 1: question I propose to examine in the present discourse. As
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Speaker 1: mankind in general have an interest in my subject, I
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Speaker 1: shall endeavor to use a language suitable to all nations,
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Speaker 1: or rather forgetting the circumstances of time and place, in
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Speaker 1: order to think of nothing but the men I speak to.
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Speaker 1: I shall suppose myself in the Lyceum of Athens, repeating
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Speaker 1: the lessons of my master's, before the Plato's and the
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Speaker 1: Xenocrates of that famous seat of philosophy, as my judges,
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Speaker 1: and in presence of the whole human species as my audience.
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Speaker 1: Oh man, whatever country you may belong to, whatever your
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Speaker 1: opinions may be, attend to my words. You shall hear
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Speaker 1: your history such as I think I have read it,
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Speaker 1: Not in books composed by those like you, for they
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Speaker 1: are liars, but in the Book of Nature, which never lies.
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Speaker 1: All that I shall repeat after her must be true
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Speaker 1: without any intermixture of falsehood. But where I may happen
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Speaker 1: without intending it to introduce my own conceits. The times
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Speaker 1: I am going to speak of are very remote, how
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Speaker 1: much you are changed from what you once were. 'tis,
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Speaker 1: in a manner the life of your species that I
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Speaker 1: am going to write from the qualities which you have received,
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Speaker 1: and which your education and your habits could deprave but
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Speaker 1: could not destroy. There is is, I am sensible, an
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Speaker 1: age at which every individual of you would choose to stop.
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Speaker 1: And you will look out for the age at which,
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Speaker 1: had you your wish your species had stopped. Uneasy at
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Speaker 1: your present condition, for reasons which threaten your unhappy posterity
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Speaker 1: with still greater uneasiness, you will perhaps wish it were
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Speaker 1: in your power to go back. And this sentiment ought
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Speaker 1: to be considered as the penniesiac of your first parents,
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Speaker 1: the condemnation of your contemporaries, and a source of terror
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Speaker 1: to all those who may have the misfortune of succeeding you.
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Speaker 1: End opening section of the Discourse on Inequality. Section two
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Speaker 1: of the Discourse on Inequality by Jean Jacques Rousseau. This
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Speaker 1: is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox records in the public domain.
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Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
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Speaker 1: This is a reading by Eric Jonas a discourse upon
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Speaker 1: the origin and the foundation of the inequality among mankind
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Speaker 1: by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Discourse, first Part, Section one Discourse
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Speaker 1: first Part. However important it may be in order to
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Speaker 1: form a proper judgment of the natural state of man,
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Speaker 1: to consider him from his origin, and to examine him,
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Speaker 1: as it were in the first embryo of the species,
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Speaker 1: I shall not attempt to trace his organization through its
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Speaker 1: successive approaches to perfection. I shall not stop to examine,
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Speaker 1: in the animal system what he might have been in
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Speaker 1: the beginning, to become at last what he actually is.
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Speaker 1: I shall not inquire whether, as Aristotle thinks, his neglected
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Speaker 1: nails were no better at first than crooked talons, His
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Speaker 1: whole body was not bear like, thick, covered with rough hair,
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Speaker 1: and weather walking upon all fours. His eyes directed to
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Speaker 1: the earth and confined to a horizon of a few
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Speaker 1: paces extend, did not at once point out the nature
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Speaker 1: and limit of his ideas. I could only form vague
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Speaker 1: and almost imaginary conjectures on this subject. Comparative anatomy has
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Speaker 1: not as yet been sufficiently improved. Neither have the observations
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Speaker 1: of natural philosophy been sufficiently ascertained to establish upon such
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Speaker 1: foundations the basis of a solid system. For this reason,
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Speaker 1: without having recourse to the supernatural informations with which we
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Speaker 1: have been favored on this head, or paying any attention
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Speaker 1: to the changes that must have happened in the confirmation
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Speaker 1: of the interior and exterior parts of man's body, in
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Speaker 1: proportion as he applied his members to new purposes and
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Speaker 1: took new ailments, I shall suppose his confirmation to always
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Speaker 1: have been what we now behold. It that he always
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Speaker 1: walked on two feet, made the same use of his
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Speaker 1: hands that we do of ours, extended his looks over
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Speaker 1: the whole face of nature, and measured with his eyes
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Speaker 1: the vast extent of the heavens. If I strip this
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Speaker 1: being thus constituted of all the supernatural gifts which he
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Speaker 1: may have received, and of all the artificial faculties which
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Speaker 1: we could not have acquired, but by slow degrees, if
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Speaker 1: I consider him in a word such as he must
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Speaker 1: have issued from the hands of nature, I see an
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Speaker 1: animal less strong than some, and less active than others,
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Speaker 1: but upon the whole the most advantageously organized of any
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Speaker 1: I see him satisfying the cause of hunger under the
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Speaker 1: first oak, and those of thirst at the first rivulet.
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Speaker 1: I see him laying himself down to sleep at the
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Speaker 1: foot of the same tree that afforded him his meal.
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Speaker 1: And behold this done, All of his wants are completely supplied.
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Speaker 1: The earth left to its own natural fertility, and covered
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Speaker 1: with immense woods that no hatchet, ever disfigured, offers at
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Speaker 1: every step food and shelter to every species of animals.
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Speaker 1: Men dispersed among them observe and imitate their industry, and
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Speaker 1: thus rise to the instinct of beasts. With this advantage that,
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Speaker 1: whereas every species of beasts is confined to one peculiar instinct,
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Speaker 1: man who perhaps has not any that particularly belonged to him,
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Speaker 1: appropriates to himself those of all other animals, and lives
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Speaker 1: equally upon most of the different ailments which they only
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Speaker 1: divide among themselves, a circumstance which qualifies him to find
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Speaker 1: his subsistence with more ease than any of them. Men
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Speaker 1: accustomed from their infancy to the inclemency of the weather
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Speaker 1: and to the rigor of the different seasons, inured to fatigue,
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Speaker 1: and obliged to defend naked and without arms, their life
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Speaker 1: and their prey against the other wild inhabitants of the forest,
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Speaker 1: or at least to avoid their fury by flight, acquire
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Speaker 1: a robust and almost unalterable habit of body, the children,
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Speaker 1: bringing with them into the world the excellent constitution of
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Speaker 1: their parents, and strengthening it by the same exercises that
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Speaker 1: first produced it. Attained by this means all the vigor
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Speaker 1: that the human frame is capable of. Nature treats them
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Speaker 1: exactly in the same manner that Sparta treated the children
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Speaker 1: of her citizens. Those who come well formed into the world.
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Speaker 1: She renders strong and robust, and destroys all the rest,
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Speaker 1: differing in this respect from our societies, in which the state,
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Speaker 1: by permitting children to become burdensome to their parents, murders
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Speaker 1: them all without distinction, even in the wombs of their mothers.
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Speaker 1: The body being the only instrument that savage man is
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Speaker 1: acquainted with, he employs it to such different uses of
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Speaker 1: which ours, for want of practice, are incapable, And we
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Speaker 1: may thank our industry for the loss of that strength
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Speaker 1: and agility which necessity obliges him to acquire. Had he
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Speaker 1: a hatchet, would his hands so easily snap from an
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Speaker 1: oak so stout a branch. Had he a sling, would
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Speaker 1: it dart a stone to so great a distance? Hattie
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Speaker 1: a ladder? Would it run so nimbly up a tree?
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Speaker 1: Had he a horse, would he with such swiftness shoot
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Speaker 1: along the plane? Give civilized man but time to gather
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Speaker 1: about him all his machines, and no doubt he will
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Speaker 1: be an overmatch for the savage. But if you have
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Speaker 1: a mind to see a contest still more unequal, place
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Speaker 1: them naked and unarmed, one opposite to the other, and
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Speaker 1: you will soon discover the advantage there is in perpetually
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Speaker 1: having all our forces at our disposal, in being constantly
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Speaker 1: prepared against all events, and in always carrying ourselves, as
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Speaker 1: it were, whole and entire about us. Hobbes would have
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Speaker 1: it that man is naturally void of fear, and always
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Speaker 1: intent upon attacking and fighting. An illustrious philosopher thinks on
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Speaker 1: the contrary, and Cumberland and Puffendorf likewise affirm it that
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Speaker 1: nothing is more fearful than man in a state of nature,
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Speaker 1: that he is always in a tremble and ready to
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Speaker 1: fly at the first motion he perceives, at the first
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Speaker 1: noise that strikes his ears. This indeed may be very
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Speaker 1: true in regard to objects with which he is not acquainted,
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Speaker 1: And I make no doubt of his being terrified at
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Speaker 1: every new sight that presents itself, as often he cannot
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Speaker 1: distinguish the physical good and evil which he may expect
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Speaker 1: from it, nor compare his forces with the dangers he
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Speaker 1: has to encounter circumstances that seldom occur in a state
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Speaker 1: of nature, where all things proceed in so uniform a manner,
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Speaker 1: and the face of the earth is not liable to
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Speaker 1: those sudden and continual changes occasioned in it by the
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Speaker 1: passions and inconstanties of collected bodies. But savage man, living
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Speaker 1: among other animals, without any society or fixed habitation, confinding
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Speaker 1: himself early under a necessity of measuring his strength with theirs,
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Speaker 1: soon makes a comparison between both, and, finding that he
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Speaker 1: surpasses them more in address than they surpass him in strength,
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Speaker 1: he learns not to be any longer in dread of them.
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Speaker 1: Turn out a bear or a wolf against a sturdy, active,
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Speaker 1: resolute savage, as in this they all are provided with
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Speaker 1: stones and a good stick, and you will soon find
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Speaker 1: that the danger is at least equal on both sides,
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Speaker 1: and that after several trials of this kind, wild beasts
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Speaker 1: who are not fond of attacking each other, will not
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Speaker 1: be very fond of attacking man, whom they have found
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Speaker 1: every whit as wild as themselves. As to animals who
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Speaker 1: have really more strength than man has address, he is
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Speaker 1: in regard to them, what other weaker species are who
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Speaker 1: find means to subsist. Notwithstanding, he has even this great
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Speaker 1: advantage over such weaker species, that, being equally fleet with them,
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Speaker 1: and finding on every tree an almost inviolable asylum, he
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Speaker 1: is always at liberty to take it or leave it
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Speaker 1: as he likes best, and of course to fight or
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Speaker 1: to fly, whichever is most agreeable to him. To this,
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Speaker 1: we may add that no animal naturally makes war upon man,
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Speaker 1: except in the case of self defense or extreme hunger,
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Speaker 1: nor even expresses against him any of those violent antipathies
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Speaker 1: which seem to indicate that some particular speed she are
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Speaker 1: intended by nature for the food of others. But there
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Speaker 1: are other more formidable enemies, and against which man is
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Speaker 1: not provided with the same means of defense. I mean
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Speaker 1: natural infirmities, infancy, old age, and sickness of every kind, melancholy,
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Speaker 1: proofs of our weakness, whereof the two first are common
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Speaker 1: to all animals, and the last chiefly attends man living
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Speaker 1: in a state of society. It is even observable in
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Speaker 1: regard to infancy, that the mother, being able to carry
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Speaker 1: her child about with her wherever she goes, can perform
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Speaker 1: the duty of a nurse with a great deal less
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Speaker 1: trouble than the females of many other animals, who are
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Speaker 1: obliged to be constantly going and coming with no small
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Speaker 1: labor and fatigue, one way to look out for their
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Speaker 1: own subsistence, and another to suckle and feed their young ones. True,
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Speaker 1: it is that if the woman happens to perish, her
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Speaker 1: child is exposed to the greatest danger of perishing with her.
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Speaker 1: But this danger is common to a hundred other species
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Speaker 1: whose young ones require wh i are a great deal
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Speaker 1: of time to be able to provide for themselves. And
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Speaker 1: if our infancy is longer than theirs, our life is longer. Likewise,
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Speaker 1: so that in this respect, too, all things are in
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Speaker 1: a manner equal. Not but that there are rather rules
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Speaker 1: concerning the duration of the first age of life and
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Speaker 1: the number of young of man and other animals. But
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Speaker 1: they do not belong to my subject. With old men
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Speaker 1: who stir and perspire but little, the demand for food
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Speaker 1: diminishes with their abilities to provide it, and as a
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Speaker 1: savage life would exempt them from the gout in the
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Speaker 1: Rheumatism and old age is of all ills that which
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Speaker 1: human assistance is least capable of alleviating. They would at
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Speaker 1: last go off without its being perceived by others, that
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Speaker 1: they cease to exist, and almost without perceiving it themselves.
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Speaker 1: In regard to sickness, I shall not repeat the vain
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Speaker 1: and false declamations made use of to discredit medicine by
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Speaker 1: most men while they enjoy their health. I shall they
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Speaker 1: ask if there are any solid observations from which we
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Speaker 1: may conclude that in those countries where the healing art
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Speaker 1: is most neglected, the mean duration of man's life is
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Speaker 1: shorter than in those where it is most cultivated. And
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Speaker 1: how is it possible this should be the case if
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Speaker 1: we inflict more diseases upon ourselves and medicine can supply
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Speaker 1: us with remedies. The extreme inequalities in the manner of
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Speaker 1: living of the several classes of mankind, the excess of
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Speaker 1: idleness in some and of labor and others, the facility
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Speaker 1: of irritating and satisfying our sensuality and our appetites, the
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Speaker 1: two exquisite and out of the way ailments of the rich,
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Speaker 1: which fill them with fiery juices and bring on indigestions.
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Speaker 1: The unwholesome food of the poor, of which, even bad
21:45
Speaker 1: as it is, they very often fall short, and the
21:48
Speaker 1: want of which tempt them every opportunity that offers to
21:51
Speaker 1: eat greedily and overload their stomachs, watchings, excesses of every kind,
21:56
Speaker 1: immoderate transports of all the passions, fatigues, ways of spirits.
22:01
Speaker 1: In a word, the numberless pains and anxieties annexed to
22:04
Speaker 1: every condition in which the mind of man is constantly
22:08
Speaker 1: a prey to. These are the fatal proofs that most
22:11
Speaker 1: of our ills are of our own making, and that
22:14
Speaker 1: we might have avoided them all by adhering to the simple,
22:17
Speaker 1: uniform and solitary way of life prescribed to us by nature.
22:22
Speaker 1: Allowing that nature intended we should always enjoy good health.
22:25
Speaker 1: I dare almost affirm that a state of reflection is
22:28
Speaker 1: a state against nature, and that the man who meditates
22:31
Speaker 1: is a depraved animal. We need only call to mind
22:34
Speaker 1: the good constitution of savages. Of those at least whom
22:37
Speaker 1: we have not destroyed by our strong liquors, we need
22:41
Speaker 1: only reflect that they are strangers to almost every disease,
22:44
Speaker 1: except those occasioned by wounds in old age to be
22:46
Speaker 1: in a manner convinced that the history of human diseases
22:49
Speaker 1: might be easily composed by pursuing that of civil societies. Such,
22:54
Speaker 1: at least was the opinion of Plato, who concluded from
22:57
Speaker 1: certain remedies made use of or approved by Podalarrus and
23:00
Speaker 1: Macaron at the Siege of troy At several disorders which
23:04
Speaker 1: these remedies were found to bring on in his days
23:06
Speaker 1: were not known among men at that remote period. Man, therefore,
23:11
Speaker 1: in a state of nature where there are so few
23:13
Speaker 1: sources of sickness, can have no great occasion for physic
23:17
Speaker 1: and still less for physicians. Neither is the human species
23:20
Speaker 1: more to be pitied in this respect than any other
23:23
Speaker 1: species of animals. Ask those who make hunting their recreation
23:27
Speaker 1: or business, if in their excursions they meet with many
23:30
Speaker 1: sick or feeble animals, they meet with many carrying the
23:34
Speaker 1: marks of considerable wounds that have been perfectly well healed
23:37
Speaker 1: and closed up with many whose bones formally broken and
23:41
Speaker 1: whose limbs almost torn off, have completely knit and united
23:45
Speaker 1: without any other surgeon, but time, any other regimen, but
23:48
Speaker 1: their usual way of living, and whose cures were not
23:51
Speaker 1: the less perfect for their not having been tortured with incisions,
23:54
Speaker 1: poisoned with drugs, or worn out by diet and abstinence.
23:59
Speaker 1: In a word, however useful medicine well administered may be
24:03
Speaker 1: to us who live in a state of society, it
24:05
Speaker 1: is still past doubt that if, on the one hand,
24:08
Speaker 1: the sixth savage destitute of help, has nothing to hope
24:11
Speaker 1: from nature, on the other, he has nothing to fear
24:14
Speaker 1: but from his disease, a circumstance which often renders his
24:18
Speaker 1: situation preferable to ours. Let us therefore, beware of confounding
24:24
Speaker 1: savage man with the men whom we daily see and
24:27
Speaker 1: converse with. Nature behaves towards all animals left to our care,
24:31
Speaker 1: with a predilection that seems to prove how jealous she
24:34
Speaker 1: is of that prerogative. The horse, the cat, the bull, ney,
24:38
Speaker 1: the aci itself have generally a higher stature and always
24:42
Speaker 1: a more robust constitution, more vigor, more strength, and courage
24:47
Speaker 1: in their forests than in our houses. They lose half
24:50
Speaker 1: these advantages by becoming domestic animals. It looks as if
24:54
Speaker 1: all our attention to treat them kindly and to feed
24:56
Speaker 1: them well, served only to bastardize them. It is thus
25:00
Speaker 1: with man himself in proportion, as he becomes sociable and
25:04
Speaker 1: a slave to others, he becomes weak, fearful, mean spirited,
25:08
Speaker 1: and his soft and effeminate way of living at once
25:11
Speaker 1: completes the enervation of his strength and of his courage.
25:15
Speaker 1: We may add that there must be still a wider
25:18
Speaker 1: difference between man and man in a savage and domestic
25:21
Speaker 1: condition than between beast and beast. For as men and
25:25
Speaker 1: beasts have been treated alike by nature, all the conveniences
25:29
Speaker 1: with which men indulge themselves more than they do the
25:32
Speaker 1: beasts tamed by them, are so many particular causes which
25:36
Speaker 1: make them degenerate more sensibly nakedness. Therefore, the want of houses,
25:43
Speaker 1: and of all these unnecessaries which we consider as so
25:46
Speaker 1: very necessary, are not such mighty evils in respect to
25:50
Speaker 1: these primitive men, and much less still any obstacle to
25:54
Speaker 1: their preservation. Their skins, it is true, are destitute of hair,
25:58
Speaker 1: but then they have no occasion for any such covering
26:01
Speaker 1: in warm climates, and in cold climates they soon learned
26:04
Speaker 1: to apply to that use. Those of the animals they
26:07
Speaker 1: have conquered. They have but two feet to run with,
26:10
Speaker 1: They have but two hands to defend themselves with, and
26:13
Speaker 1: provide for all their wants. It costs them, perhaps a
26:17
Speaker 1: great deal of time and trouble to make their children walk,
26:20
Speaker 1: but the mothers carry them with ease, an advantage not
26:23
Speaker 1: granted to other species of animals, with whom the mother,
26:25
Speaker 1: when pursued, is obliged to abandon her young ones or
26:29
Speaker 1: regulate her steps by theirs. In short, unless we admit
26:34
Speaker 1: those singular and fortuitous concurrences of circumstances which I shall
26:38
Speaker 1: speak of hereafter, and which it is very possible, may
26:41
Speaker 1: never have existed, it is evident in every state of
26:44
Speaker 1: the question that the man who first made himself clothed
26:48
Speaker 1: and built himself a cabin, supplied himself with things he
26:51
Speaker 1: did not much want, since he had lived without them
26:54
Speaker 1: till then. And why should he not have been able
26:56
Speaker 1: to support in his riper years the same kind of
26:59
Speaker 1: life which she had done supported from his infancy alone,
27:03
Speaker 1: idle and always surrounded with danger, savage man must be
27:07
Speaker 1: fond of sleep, and sleep lightly like other animals, who
27:10
Speaker 1: think but little, and may, in a manner be said
27:13
Speaker 1: to sleep all the time. They do not think. Self
27:15
Speaker 1: preservation being almost his only concern, he must exercise those
27:20
Speaker 1: faculties most which are most serviceable in attacking and defending,
27:24
Speaker 1: whether to subdue his prey or to prevent his becoming
27:27
Speaker 1: that of other animals. Those organs, on the contrary, which
27:31
Speaker 1: softness and sensuality alone can improve, must remain in a
27:35
Speaker 1: state of rudeness, utterly incompatible with all manner of delicacy.
27:40
Speaker 1: And as his senses are divided on this point, his
27:43
Speaker 1: touch and his taste must be extremely coarse and blunt,
27:47
Speaker 1: his sight, his hearing, and his smelling equally subtle. Such
27:51
Speaker 1: is the animal state in general, and accordingly, if we
27:54
Speaker 1: may believe travelers, it is that of most savage nations.
27:58
Speaker 1: We must therefore not be supprise eyes that the Hottentots
28:01
Speaker 1: of the Cape of Good Hope distinguished with their naked
28:04
Speaker 1: eyes ships on the ocean at as a great distance
28:07
Speaker 1: as the Dutch can discern them with their glasses, Nor
28:10
Speaker 1: the savages of America should have tracked the Spaniards with
28:13
Speaker 1: their noses to as great a degree of exactness as
28:16
Speaker 1: the best dogs could have done. Nor that all these
28:20
Speaker 1: barbarous nations support nakedness without pain, use such large quantities
28:24
Speaker 1: of pimento to give their food a relish and drink
28:28
Speaker 1: like water the strongest liquors of Europe. End of section
28:34
Speaker 1: one of discourse, first part, Section three of the Discourse
28:46
Speaker 1: on Inequality by Jean Jacques Rousseau. This is a LibriVox recording.
28:54
Speaker 1: All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
28:58
Speaker 1: information or to volunar tir, please visit LibriVox dot org.
29:03
Speaker 1: This is a reading by Eric Jonas a Discourse upon
29:07
Speaker 1: the origin and the foundation of the inequality among Mankind
29:11
Speaker 1: by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Discourse, first Part, Section two. As
29:18
Speaker 1: yet I have considered man merely in his physical capacity.
29:22
Speaker 1: Let us now endeavor to examine him in a metaphysical
29:25
Speaker 1: and moral light. I can discover nothing in any mere
29:29
Speaker 1: animal but an ingenious machine to which Nature has given
29:33
Speaker 1: senses to wind itself up and guard to a certain
29:37
Speaker 1: degree against everything that might destroy or disorder it. I
29:41
Speaker 1: perceive the very same things in the human machine, with
29:44
Speaker 1: this difference that Nature alone operates in all the operations
29:48
Speaker 1: of the beast, whereas man, as a free agent, has
29:52
Speaker 1: a share in his one chooses by instinct, the other
29:56
Speaker 1: by an act of liberty. For which reason, the beast
29:59
Speaker 1: cannot deviate from the rules that have been prescribed to it,
30:02
Speaker 1: even in cases where such deviation might be useful, and
30:06
Speaker 1: man often deviates from the rules laid down for him
30:09
Speaker 1: to his prejudice. Thus, a pigeon would starve near a
30:13
Speaker 1: dish of the best flesh meat, and a cat on
30:16
Speaker 1: a heap of fruit or corn, though both might very
30:19
Speaker 1: well support life with the food they thus disdain, did
30:23
Speaker 1: they but bethink themselves to make a trial of it.
30:26
Speaker 1: It is in this manner dissolute men run into excesses,
30:30
Speaker 1: which bring on fevers and death itself. Because the mind
30:34
Speaker 1: depraves the senses, and when nature ceases to speak, the
30:38
Speaker 1: will still continues to dictate. All animals must be allowed
30:43
Speaker 1: to have ideas. Since all animals have senses, they even
30:46
Speaker 1: combine their ideas to a certain degree, And in this
30:49
Speaker 1: respect it is only the difference of such degree that
30:52
Speaker 1: constitutes the difference between man and beast. Some philosophers have
30:56
Speaker 1: even advanced that there is a greater difference between some
30:59
Speaker 1: men and others than between some men and some beasts.
31:03
Speaker 1: It is not therefore so much the understanding that constitutes
31:07
Speaker 1: among animals the specifical distinction of man, as his quality
31:12
Speaker 1: of a free agent, nature speaks to all animals and
31:16
Speaker 1: beasts obey her voice. Man feels the same impression. But
31:20
Speaker 1: he at the same time perceives that he is free
31:22
Speaker 1: to resist or to acquiesce. And it is in the
31:25
Speaker 1: consciousness of this liberty that the spirituality of his soul
31:29
Speaker 1: chiefly appears. For natural philosophy explains in some measure the
31:33
Speaker 1: mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas. But
31:37
Speaker 1: in the power of willing, or rather of choosing, and
31:41
Speaker 1: in the consciousness of this power, nothing can be discovered
31:44
Speaker 1: but acts that are purely spiritual, and cannot be accounted
31:48
Speaker 1: for by the laws of mechanics. But though the difficulties
31:53
Speaker 1: in which all these questions are involved should leave some
31:55
Speaker 1: room to dispute on this difference between man and beast,
31:59
Speaker 1: there is an another very specific quality that distinguishes them,
32:03
Speaker 1: and a quality which will admit of no dispute. This
32:06
Speaker 1: is the faculty of improvement, a faculty which as circumstances
32:11
Speaker 1: offer successively, unfolds all the other faculties, and resides among us,
32:16
Speaker 1: not only in the species, but in the individuals that
32:19
Speaker 1: compose it. Whereas a beast is at the end of
32:23
Speaker 1: some months all he will ever be during the rest
32:25
Speaker 1: of his life, and his species at the end of
32:28
Speaker 1: a thousand years, precisely what it was the first year
32:31
Speaker 1: of that long period. Why is man alone subject to dotage?
32:37
Speaker 1: Is it not because he thus returns to his primitive condition,
32:41
Speaker 1: And because while the beast, which has acquired nothing and
32:43
Speaker 1: thus has likewise nothing to lose, continues always in possession
32:48
Speaker 1: of his instinct, Man, losing by old age or by accident,
32:51
Speaker 1: all the acquisitions he has made in consequence of his perfectibility,
32:56
Speaker 1: thus falls back even lower than the beasts themselves. It
33:00
Speaker 1: would be a melancholy necessity for us to be obliged
33:03
Speaker 1: to allow that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is
33:06
Speaker 1: the source of all man's misfortunes. That it is this
33:10
Speaker 1: faculty which, though by slow degrees, draws them out of
33:14
Speaker 1: their original condition, in which these days would slide away
33:18
Speaker 1: insensibly in peace and innocence. That it is this faculty which,
33:23
Speaker 1: in a succession of ages, produces his discoveries and mistakes,
33:27
Speaker 1: his virtues and his vices, and at long run renders
33:31
Speaker 1: him both his own and nature's tyrant. It will be
33:35
Speaker 1: shocking to be obliged to commend as a beneficent being,
33:39
Speaker 1: whoever he was that first suggested to the Ironico Indians
33:42
Speaker 1: the use of those boards which they bind on the
33:45
Speaker 1: temples of their children, and which secure to them the
33:48
Speaker 1: enjoyment of some part at least of their natural imbecility
33:51
Speaker 1: and happiness. Savage man, abandoned by nature to pure instinct,
33:57
Speaker 1: or rather indemnified for that which has perhaps been denied
34:00
Speaker 1: to him by faculties capable of immediately supplying the place
34:03
Speaker 1: of it, and of raising him afterwards a great deal higher,
34:07
Speaker 1: would therefore begin with functions that were merely animal. To
34:11
Speaker 1: see and to feel would be his first condition, which
34:14
Speaker 1: he would enjoy in common with other animals. To will
34:17
Speaker 1: and not to will, to wish and to fear would
34:21
Speaker 1: be the first, and in a manner, the only operations
34:24
Speaker 1: of his soul till new circumstances occasioned new developments. Let
34:29
Speaker 1: moralists say what they will. The human understanding is greatly
34:32
Speaker 1: indebted to the passions which on their side are likewise
34:36
Speaker 1: universally allowed to be greatly indebted to the human understanding.
34:41
Speaker 1: It is by the activity of our passions that our
34:44
Speaker 1: reason improves. We covet knowledge merely because we covet enjoyment,
34:49
Speaker 1: And it is impossible to conceive why a man exempt
34:52
Speaker 1: from fears and desires should take the trouble to reason.
34:55
Speaker 1: The passions, in their turn, owe their origin to our wants,
35:00
Speaker 1: and their increase to our progress in science. For we
35:03
Speaker 1: cannot desire or fear anything but in consequence of the
35:06
Speaker 1: ideas we have of it, or of the simple impulses
35:10
Speaker 1: of nature and savage man, destitute of every species of knowledge,
35:14
Speaker 1: experiences no passion but those of this last kind. His
35:18
Speaker 1: desires never extend beyond his physical wants. He knows no
35:22
Speaker 1: goods but food of female and rest. He fears no
35:26
Speaker 1: evil but pain and hunger. I say pain and not death,
35:30
Speaker 1: for no animal merely as such, will ever know what
35:33
Speaker 1: it is to die, And the knowledge of death and
35:36
Speaker 1: of its terrors is one of the first acquisitions made
35:39
Speaker 1: by man in consequence of his deviating from the animal state.
35:43
Speaker 1: I could easily were requisite cite factions and support of
35:47
Speaker 1: this opinion and show that the progress of the mind
35:49
Speaker 1: has everywhere kept pace exactly with the wants to which
35:53
Speaker 1: Nature had left the inhabitants exposed, or to which circumstances
35:57
Speaker 1: had subjected them, and consequently to the passions which incline
36:01
Speaker 1: them to provide for these wants. I could exhibit in
36:05
Speaker 1: Egypt the arts starting up and extending themselves with the
36:08
Speaker 1: inundations of the Nile. I could pursue them in their
36:11
Speaker 1: progress among the Greeks, where they were seen to bud forth,
36:15
Speaker 1: grow and rise to the heavens in the midst of
36:17
Speaker 1: the sands and rocks of Attica, without being able to
36:21
Speaker 1: take root on the fertile banks of the Eurotas, I
36:24
Speaker 1: would observe that, in general the inhabitants of the North
36:27
Speaker 1: are more industrious than those of the South, because they
36:30
Speaker 1: can do less without industry. As if Nature thus meant
36:34
Speaker 1: to make all things equal by giving to the mind
36:36
Speaker 1: that fertility she has denied to the soil. But exclusive
36:41
Speaker 1: of the uncertain testimonies of history, who does not perceive
36:45
Speaker 1: that everything seems to remove from savage man the temptation
36:49
Speaker 1: and the means of altering its condition, his imagination paints
36:53
Speaker 1: nothing to him his heart asks nothing from him. His
36:57
Speaker 1: moderate wants are so easily supplied with what he everywhere
37:00
Speaker 1: finds ready to his hand. And he stands at such
37:03
Speaker 1: a distance from the degree of knowledge requisite to covet more,
37:07
Speaker 1: and he can neither have foresight nor curiosity. The spectacle
37:11
Speaker 1: of nature, by growing quite familiar to him, becomes at
37:15
Speaker 1: last equally indifferent. It is constantly the same order, constantly
37:20
Speaker 1: the same revolutions. He has not sense enough to feel
37:24
Speaker 1: surprised at the sight of the greatest wonders, And it
37:27
Speaker 1: is not in his mind. We must look for that
37:29
Speaker 1: philosophy which man must have to know how to observe
37:33
Speaker 1: once what he has every day seen. His soul, which
37:37
Speaker 1: nothing disturbs, gives itself up entirely to the consciousness of
37:40
Speaker 1: its actual existence, without any thought of even the nearest futurity,
37:45
Speaker 1: and his projects, equally confined, with his views scarce extend
37:50
Speaker 1: to the end of the day. Such is even at
37:53
Speaker 1: present the degree of foresight. In the Caribbean, he sells
37:57
Speaker 1: his cotton bed in the morning, and comes in the
37:59
Speaker 1: evening with tears in his eyes, to buy it back,
38:02
Speaker 1: not having foreseen that he should want it again the
38:05
Speaker 1: next night. The more we meditate on this subject, the
38:08
Speaker 1: wider does the distance between mere sensation and the most
38:12
Speaker 1: simple knowledge become in our eyes. And it is impossible
38:16
Speaker 1: to conceive how man, by his own powers alone, without
38:19
Speaker 1: the assistance of communication and the spur of necessity, could
38:23
Speaker 1: have got over so great an interval. How many ages
38:27
Speaker 1: perhaps revolved before men beheld any other fire but that
38:31
Speaker 1: of the heavens. How many different accidents must have concurred
38:35
Speaker 1: to make them acquainted with the most common uses of
38:38
Speaker 1: this element? How often have they let it go out
38:41
Speaker 1: before they knew the art of reproducing it? And how often, perhaps,
38:45
Speaker 1: has not every one of these secrets perished with the discoverer.
38:49
Speaker 1: What shall we say of agriculture, an art which requires
38:52
Speaker 1: so much labor and foresight, which depends upon other arts,
38:57
Speaker 1: which it is very evident, cannot be practiced button as
39:00
Speaker 1: society if not a formed one, at least one of
39:02
Speaker 1: some standing, and which does not so much serve to
39:05
Speaker 1: draw ailiments from the earth, for the earth would yield
39:08
Speaker 1: them without all that trouble as to oblige her to
39:10
Speaker 1: produce those things which you like best preferably to others.
39:14
Speaker 1: But let us suppose that men had multiplied to such
39:17
Speaker 1: a degree that the natural products of the earth no
39:19
Speaker 1: longer sufficed for their support, a supposition which, by the bye,
39:24
Speaker 1: would prove that this kind of life would be very
39:26
Speaker 1: advantageous to the human species. Let us suppose that without
39:30
Speaker 1: forge or anvil, the instruments of husbandry had dropped from
39:34
Speaker 1: the heavens into the hands of savages. That these men
39:37
Speaker 1: had got the better of that mortal aversion they all
39:40
Speaker 1: have for constant labor, That they had learned to foretell
39:43
Speaker 1: their wants at so great a distance of time, that
39:46
Speaker 1: they had guessed exactly how they were to break the earth,
39:49
Speaker 1: commit their seed to it, and plant trees. That they
39:52
Speaker 1: had found out the art of grinding their corn and
39:55
Speaker 1: improving by fermentation the juice of their grapes, all operations
39:59
Speaker 1: which we must allow them to have learned from the gods,
40:02
Speaker 1: since we cannot conceive how they should make such a
40:05
Speaker 1: discoveries of themselves. After all these fine presents, what man
40:09
Speaker 1: would be mad enough to cultivate a field that may
40:11
Speaker 1: be robbed by the first comer man or beast who
40:14
Speaker 1: takes a fancy to the produce of it, And would
40:16
Speaker 1: any man consent to spend his day in labor and fatigue,
40:20
Speaker 1: when the rewards of his labor and fatigue become more
40:22
Speaker 1: and more precarious in proportioned to his want of them.
40:26
Speaker 1: In a word, how could this situation engage men to
40:28
Speaker 1: cultivate the earth as long as it was not parceled
40:31
Speaker 1: out among them, that is, as long as a state
40:34
Speaker 1: of nature subsisted. Though we should suppose savage man as
40:38
Speaker 1: well versed in the art of thinking as philosophers make him,
40:42
Speaker 1: though we were, after them, to make him a philosopher himself,
40:45
Speaker 1: discovering of himself the sublimest truths, forming to himself by
40:48
Speaker 1: the most abstract arguments, maxims of justice and reason, drawn
40:52
Speaker 1: from the love of order in general, or from the
40:55
Speaker 1: known will of his creator. In a word, though we
40:58
Speaker 1: were to suppose his mind as intelligent and enlightened as
41:01
Speaker 1: it must, and is in fact found to be dull
41:05
Speaker 1: and stupid. What benefit would the species receive from all
41:08
Speaker 1: these metaphysical discoveries, which could not be communicated, but must
41:12
Speaker 1: perish with the individual who had made them. What progress
41:16
Speaker 1: could mankind make in the forests scattered up and down
41:19
Speaker 1: among the other animals, And to what degree could men
41:22
Speaker 1: mutually improve and enlighten each other, when they had no
41:25
Speaker 1: fixed habitation nor any need for each other's assistance. When
41:30
Speaker 1: the same persons scarcely met twice in their whole lives,
41:33
Speaker 1: and our meeting neither spoke to or so much as
41:36
Speaker 1: knew each other. Let us consider how many ideas we
41:40
Speaker 1: owe to the use of speech, and how much grammar
41:43
Speaker 1: exercises and facilitates the operations of the mind. Let us, besides,
41:48
Speaker 1: reflect on the immense pains and time that the first
41:51
Speaker 1: invention of languages must have required. Let us add these
41:55
Speaker 1: reflections to the preceding, and then we may judge how
41:58
Speaker 1: many thousand ages must have been requisite to develop successively
42:02
Speaker 1: the operations which the human mind is capable of producing.
42:06
Speaker 1: I must now beg leave to stop one moment to
42:09
Speaker 1: consider the perplexities attending the origin of languages. I might
42:13
Speaker 1: here barely cite or repeat the research is made in
42:17
Speaker 1: relation to this question by the abbe des condilact, which
42:20
Speaker 1: all fully confirm my system, and perhaps even suggested to
42:24
Speaker 1: me the first idea of it. But as the manner
42:27
Speaker 1: in which the philosopher resolves the difficulties of his own
42:30
Speaker 1: starting concerning the origin of arbitrary signs, shows that he
42:34
Speaker 1: supposes what I doubt, namely a kind of society already
42:38
Speaker 1: established among the inventors of languages. I think it my duty,
42:42
Speaker 1: at the same time that I refer to his reflections
42:45
Speaker 1: to give my own, in order to expose the same
42:48
Speaker 1: difficulties and a light suitable to my subject. The first
42:51
Speaker 1: that offers is how languages could become necessary for as
42:55
Speaker 1: there was no correspondence between men, nor the least necessity
42:58
Speaker 1: for any there is no conceiving the necessity of this invention,
43:02
Speaker 1: nor the possibility of it. If it was not indispensable.
43:06
Speaker 1: I might say, with many others, that languages are the
43:09
Speaker 1: fruit of the domestic intercourse between fathers, mothers, and children.
43:14
Speaker 1: But this besides, it's not answering any difficulties, would be
43:17
Speaker 1: committing the same fault with those who, reasoning on the
43:20
Speaker 1: state of nature, transferred to it ideas collected in society,
43:24
Speaker 1: always consider families as living together under one roof, and
43:28
Speaker 1: their members as observing among themselves a union equally intimate
43:32
Speaker 1: and permanent with that which we see exist in a
43:34
Speaker 1: civil state, where so many common interests conspire to unite them.
43:39
Speaker 1: Whereas in this primitive state, as there were neither houses,
43:42
Speaker 1: nor cabins, nor any kind of property. Everyone took up
43:46
Speaker 1: his lodgings at random, and seldom continued above one night
43:49
Speaker 1: in the same place. Males and females united without any
43:53
Speaker 1: premeditated design, As chance, occasion, or desire brought them together,
43:57
Speaker 1: nor had they any great occasion for laying which to
44:00
Speaker 1: make known their thoughts to each other. They parted with
44:03
Speaker 1: the same ease. The mother suckled her children when just
44:06
Speaker 1: born for her own sake, but afterwards out of love
44:10
Speaker 1: and affection to them, when habit and custom had made
44:13
Speaker 1: them dear to her, But they no sooner gained strength
44:16
Speaker 1: enough to run about in quest of food than they
44:19
Speaker 1: separated even from her of their own accord. And as
44:22
Speaker 1: they scarce had any other method of not losing each
44:25
Speaker 1: other than that of remaining constantly in each other's sight,
44:28
Speaker 1: they soon came to such a passive forgetfulness as not
44:31
Speaker 1: even to know each other when they happened to meet again.
44:34
Speaker 1: I must further observe that the child, having all his
44:37
Speaker 1: wants to explain, and consequently more things to say to
44:40
Speaker 1: his mother than the mother can have to say to him,
44:43
Speaker 1: it is he that must be at the chief expensive invention,
44:47
Speaker 1: and the language he makes use of must be in
44:49
Speaker 1: great measure his own work. This makes the number of
44:53
Speaker 1: languages equal to that of the individuals who are to
44:55
Speaker 1: speak them. And this multiplicity of languages is further increased
44:59
Speaker 1: by the roving and vagabond kind of life, which allows
45:03
Speaker 1: no idiom time enough to acquire any consistency. For to
45:07
Speaker 1: say that the mother would have dictated to the child
45:09
Speaker 1: of the words he must employ to ask her this thing,
45:12
Speaker 1: and that may well be enough to explain in what
45:14
Speaker 1: manner languages already formed are taught, But it does not
45:18
Speaker 1: show us in what manner they are first formed. Let
45:23
Speaker 1: us suppose this first difficulty conquered. Let us for a
45:26
Speaker 1: moment consider ourselves at this side of the immense space
45:29
Speaker 1: which must have separated the pure state of nature from
45:32
Speaker 1: that in which languages became necessary. And let us, after
45:36
Speaker 1: allowing such necessity, examine how languages could begin to be established.
45:41
Speaker 1: A new difficulty, this still more stubborn than the preceding,
45:45
Speaker 1: For if men stood in need of speech to learn
45:48
Speaker 1: to think, they must have stood in still greater need
45:50
Speaker 1: of the art of thinking to invent that of speaking.
45:54
Speaker 1: And though we could conceive how the sounds of the
45:56
Speaker 1: voice came to be taken for the conventional interpreters of
45:59
Speaker 1: our idea is we should not be the nearer knowing
46:02
Speaker 1: who could have been the interpreters of this convention, for
46:05
Speaker 1: such ideas, as, in consequence of their not having any
46:08
Speaker 1: sensible objects, could not be made manifest by gesture or voice.
46:12
Speaker 1: So that we can scarce form any tolerable conjectures concerning
46:16
Speaker 1: the birth of this art of communicating our thoughts and
46:19
Speaker 1: establishing a correspondence between minds, a sublime art, which, though
46:23
Speaker 1: so remote from its origin philosophers, still behold at such
46:27
Speaker 1: a prodigious distance from its perfection that I never met
46:30
Speaker 1: with one of them bold enough to affirm it would
46:32
Speaker 1: ever arrive there. Though the revolutions necessarily produced by time
46:37
Speaker 1: are suspended in its favor, though prejudice could be banished from,
46:41
Speaker 1: or would be at least content to sit silent in
46:43
Speaker 1: the presence of our academies, And though these societies should
46:46
Speaker 1: consecrate themselves entirely and during whole ages to the study
46:50
Speaker 1: of this intricate object. The first language of man, the
46:54
Speaker 1: most universal and most energetic of all languages, In short,
46:58
Speaker 1: the only language he had occasion for before there was
47:01
Speaker 1: a necessity of persuading assembled multitudes was the cry of nature.
47:07
Speaker 1: As this cry was never extorted, but by a kind
47:10
Speaker 1: of instinct, in the most urgent cases, to implore assistance
47:13
Speaker 1: in great danger or relief in great sufferings, it was
47:16
Speaker 1: of little use in the common occurrences of life, where
47:19
Speaker 1: more moderate sentiments generally prevail. When the ideas of men
47:23
Speaker 1: began to extend and multiply, and a closer communication began
47:27
Speaker 1: to take place among them, they labored to devise more
47:30
Speaker 1: numerous signs and a more extensive language. They multiplied the
47:34
Speaker 1: inflections of the voice, and added to them gestures, which
47:38
Speaker 1: are in their own nature more expressive, and whose meaning
47:41
Speaker 1: depends less on any prior determination. They therefore expressed visible
47:46
Speaker 1: and movable objects by gestures and those which strike the
47:50
Speaker 1: ear by imitative sounds. But as gestures scarcely indicate anything
47:55
Speaker 1: except objects that are actually present or can be easily
47:58
Speaker 1: described invisible actions, as they are not of general use,
48:02
Speaker 1: since darkness or the interposition of an opaque medium renders
48:06
Speaker 1: them useless, and as besides they require attention rather than
48:10
Speaker 1: excite it. Men at length bethought themselves of substituting for
48:14
Speaker 1: them the articulations of voice, which, without having the same
48:18
Speaker 1: relation to any determinate object, are in quality of instituted
48:23
Speaker 1: signs fitter to represent all our ideas, a substitution which
48:28
Speaker 1: could only have been made by common consent, and in
48:32
Speaker 1: a manner pretty difficult to practice by men whose rude
48:35
Speaker 1: organs were unimproved by exercise. A substitution which is in
48:40
Speaker 1: itself more difficult to be conceived. Since the motives to
48:43
Speaker 1: this unanimous agreement must have been somehow or another expressed,
48:47
Speaker 1: and speech therefore appears to have been exceedingly requisite. To
48:51
Speaker 1: establish the use of speech, we must allow that the
48:55
Speaker 1: words first made use of by men had in their
48:58
Speaker 1: minds a much more extend signification than those employed in
49:02
Speaker 1: languages of some standing, and that, considering how ignorant they
49:06
Speaker 1: were of the division of speech into its constituent parts,
49:10
Speaker 1: they at first gave every word the meaning of an
49:12
Speaker 1: entire proposition, when afterwards they began to perceive the difference
49:17
Speaker 1: between the subject and attribute and between verb and noun,
49:21
Speaker 1: a distinction which required no mean effort of genius. The substantives,
49:26
Speaker 1: for a time were only so many proper names. The
49:29
Speaker 1: infinitive was the only tense, and as to adjectives, great
49:33
Speaker 1: difficulties must have attended the development of the idea that
49:36
Speaker 1: represents them, Since every adjective is an abstract word. An
49:40
Speaker 1: abstraction is an unnatural and very painful operation. At first,
49:45
Speaker 1: they gave every object a peculiar name, without any regard
49:48
Speaker 1: to its genus or species, things which these first institutions
49:51
Speaker 1: of language were in no condition to distinguish, and every
49:54
Speaker 1: individual presented itself solitary to their minds as it stands
49:58
Speaker 1: in the table of nature. If they called one oak a,
50:02
Speaker 1: they called another oak B, so that their dictionary must
50:05
Speaker 1: have been more extensive in proportion, as their knowledge of
50:08
Speaker 1: things was more confined. It could not be but a
50:11
Speaker 1: very difficult task to get rid of so diffuse an
50:14
Speaker 1: embarrassing a nomenclature, as in order to marshal the several
50:18
Speaker 1: beings under common and generic denominations, it was necessary to
50:22
Speaker 1: be first acquainted with their properties and their differences, to
50:25
Speaker 1: be stocked with observations and definitions, that is to say,
50:29
Speaker 1: to understand natural history and metaphysics, advantages which the men
50:33
Speaker 1: of these times could not have enjoyed. Besides general ideas,
50:37
Speaker 1: cannot be conveyed to the mind without the assistance of words,
50:41
Speaker 1: nor can the understanding seize them without the assistance of propositions.
50:45
Speaker 1: This is one of the reasons why mere animals cannot
50:48
Speaker 1: form such ideas, nor ever acquire the perfectibility which depends
50:52
Speaker 1: on such an operation. When a monkey leaves without the
50:55
Speaker 1: least hesitation one nut for another, are we to think
50:58
Speaker 1: he has any general idea idea of that kind of fruit,
51:02
Speaker 1: and that he compares these two individual bodies with his
51:04
Speaker 1: archetype notion of them. No, certainly, But the sight of
51:09
Speaker 1: one of these nuts calls back to his memory the
51:11
Speaker 1: sensations which he has received from the other, and his
51:14
Speaker 1: eyes modified after some certain manner, give notice to his
51:17
Speaker 1: palette of the modification it is in turn going to receive.
51:21
Speaker 1: Every general idea is purely intellectual. Let the imagination tamper,
51:26
Speaker 1: ever so little with it. It immediately becomes a particular idea.
51:31
Speaker 1: Endeavor to represent to yourself the image of a tree
51:34
Speaker 1: in general, you never will be able to do it,
51:37
Speaker 1: in spite of all your efforts. It will appear big
51:40
Speaker 1: or little, thin or tuft of a bright or a
51:42
Speaker 1: deep color, And where you master to see nothing in it.
51:45
Speaker 1: But what can be seen in every tree, Such a
51:48
Speaker 1: picture would no longer resemble any tree, beings perfectly abstract
51:52
Speaker 1: or perceivable in the same manner, or are only conceivable
51:56
Speaker 1: by the assistance of speech. The definition of a trying
52:00
Speaker 1: can alone give you a just idea of that figure.
52:03
Speaker 1: The moment you form a triangle in your mind, it
52:06
Speaker 1: is this or that particular triangle and no other, and
52:09
Speaker 1: you cannot avoid giving breadth to its lines and color
52:12
Speaker 1: to its area. We must therefore make use of propositions.
52:16
Speaker 1: We must therefore speak to have general ideas for the
52:19
Speaker 1: moment the imagination stops, the mind must stop. Two. If
52:22
Speaker 1: not assisted by speech. If therefore the first inventors who
52:26
Speaker 1: give no names to any ideas but those they had already,
52:30
Speaker 1: it follows that the first substantives could never have been
52:33
Speaker 1: anything more than proper names. End of section two of
52:40
Speaker 1: Discourse first Part Section four of the Discourse on Inequality
52:51
Speaker 1: by Jean Jacques Rousseau. This is a LibriVox recording. All
52:58
Speaker 1: LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information
53:02
Speaker 1: or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. This is
53:06
Speaker 1: a reading by Eric Jonas a discourse upon the Origin
53:10
Speaker 1: and the foundation of the Inequality among Mankind by Jean
53:14
Speaker 1: Jacques Rousseau, Discourse, first part Section three. But when by
53:20
Speaker 1: means which I cannot conceive, our new grammarians began to
53:24
Speaker 1: extend their ideas and generalize their words, the ignorance of
53:27
Speaker 1: the inventors must have confined this method to very narrow bounds.
53:32
Speaker 1: And as they had at first too much multiplied the
53:34
Speaker 1: names of individuals for want of being acquainted with the
53:37
Speaker 1: distinctions called genus and species, they afterwards made too fu
53:41
Speaker 1: genera and species for want of having considered beings in
53:44
Speaker 1: all their differences. To push the divisions far enough, they
53:48
Speaker 1: must have had more knowledge and experience than we can
53:51
Speaker 1: allow them, and have made more researches and taken more
53:54
Speaker 1: pains than we can suppose them willing to submit to. Now.
53:58
Speaker 1: If even at this present time we every day discover
54:01
Speaker 1: new species which had before escaped all our observations, how
54:04
Speaker 1: many species must have escaped the notice of men who
54:07
Speaker 1: judged of things merely from their first appearances. As to
54:11
Speaker 1: the primitive classes and the most general notions, it were
54:14
Speaker 1: superfluous to add that these they must have likewise overlooked.
54:19
Speaker 1: How for example, could they have thought of or understood
54:21
Speaker 1: the words matter, spirit, substance, mode, figure, motion. Since even
54:27
Speaker 1: our philosophers, who for so long a time have been
54:30
Speaker 1: constantly employing these terms, can themselves scarcely understand them, And
54:35
Speaker 1: since the ideas and next to these words being purely metaphysical,
54:39
Speaker 1: no models of them could be found in nature. I
54:42
Speaker 1: stop at these first advances and beseech my judges to
54:45
Speaker 1: suspend their lecture a little in order to consider what
54:48
Speaker 1: a great way language has still to go in regard
54:51
Speaker 1: to the invention of physical substantives alone, Though the easiest
54:55
Speaker 1: part of language to invent, to be able to express
54:58
Speaker 1: all the sentiments of man, to assume an invariable form,
55:02
Speaker 1: to bear being spoken in a public and to influence society,
55:06
Speaker 1: I earnestly entreat them to consider how much time and
55:09
Speaker 1: knowledge must have been requisite to find out numbers abstract words,
55:14
Speaker 1: the aortists, and all the other tenses of verbs, the
55:18
Speaker 1: particles and syntax, the method of connecting propositions and arguments,
55:22
Speaker 1: of forming all the logic of discourse. For my own part,
55:26
Speaker 1: I am so scared at the difficulties that multiply it
55:29
Speaker 1: every step, and so convinced of the almost demonstrated impossibility
55:33
Speaker 1: of languages owing their birth and establishment to means that
55:35
Speaker 1: were merely human, That I must leave to whoever may
55:38
Speaker 1: please to take it up the task of discussing this
55:40
Speaker 1: difficult problem, which was the most necessary society already formed
55:45
Speaker 1: to invent languages, or languages already invented to form society.
55:50
Speaker 1: But be the case of these origins ever so mysterious,
55:53
Speaker 1: we may at least infer from the little care which
55:56
Speaker 1: nature has taken to bring men together by mutual wants
55:59
Speaker 1: and make the use of speech easy to them, how
56:01
Speaker 1: little she has done towards making them sociable, and how
56:05
Speaker 1: little she has contributed to anything which they themselves have
56:08
Speaker 1: done to become so. In fact, it is impossible to
56:11
Speaker 1: conceive why, in this primitive state one man should have
56:15
Speaker 1: more occasion for the assistance of another than one monkey
56:18
Speaker 1: or one wolf, or that of another animal of the
56:20
Speaker 1: same species, or supposing that he had what motive could
56:25
Speaker 1: induce another to assist him, or even in this last case,
56:29
Speaker 1: how he who wanted assistance and he from whom it
56:32
Speaker 1: was wanted could agree among themselves upon the conditions. Authors
56:37
Speaker 1: I know are continually telling us that in this state,
56:40
Speaker 1: man would have been a most miserable creature. And if
56:43
Speaker 1: it is true as I fancy, I have proved it
56:46
Speaker 1: that he must have continued many ages without either the
56:48
Speaker 1: desire or the opportunity of emerging from such a state. This,
56:53
Speaker 1: their assertion could only serve to justify a charge against nature,
56:56
Speaker 1: and not against the being which nature had thus constituted.
57:00
Speaker 1: But if I thoroughly understand this term miserable, it is
57:04
Speaker 1: a word that either has no meaning or signifies nothing
57:07
Speaker 1: but a privation attended with pain and a suffering state
57:11
Speaker 1: of body or soul. Now I would fain know what
57:15
Speaker 1: kind of misery can be that of a free being
57:17
Speaker 1: whose heart enjoys perfect peace and body perfect health, and
57:20
Speaker 1: which is aptis to become insupportable to those who enjoy
57:24
Speaker 1: it a civil or a natural life. In civil life
57:27
Speaker 1: we can scarcely meet a single person who does not
57:30
Speaker 1: complain of his existence. Many even throw away as much
57:33
Speaker 1: of it as they can, and the united force of
57:36
Speaker 1: divine and human laws can hardly put bounds to this disorder.
57:40
Speaker 1: Was ever any free savage known to have been so
57:43
Speaker 1: much as tempted to complain of life and lay violent
57:46
Speaker 1: hands on himself. Let us therefore judge with less pride
57:51
Speaker 1: on which side real misery is to be placed. Nothing
57:54
Speaker 1: on the contrary must have been so unhappy as savage man,
57:58
Speaker 1: dazzled by flashes of knowledge, racked by passions and reasoning
58:03
Speaker 1: on a state different from that in which he saw
58:05
Speaker 1: himself placed. It was in consequence of a very wise
58:09
Speaker 1: providence that the faculties which he potentially enjoyed were not
58:12
Speaker 1: to develop themselves, but in proportion as their offered occasions
58:16
Speaker 1: to exercise them, lest they should be superfluous or troublesome
58:19
Speaker 1: to him when he did not want them, or tardy
58:22
Speaker 1: and useless when he did. He had, in his instinct
58:25
Speaker 1: alone everything requisite to live in a state of nature.
58:28
Speaker 1: In his cultivated reason, he has barely what is necessary
58:31
Speaker 1: to live in a state of society. It appears at
58:35
Speaker 1: first sight that as there was no kind of moral
58:37
Speaker 1: relations between men in this state, nor any known duties,
58:40
Speaker 1: they could not be either good or bad, and had
58:43
Speaker 1: neither vices nor virtues, unless we take these words in
58:46
Speaker 1: a physical sense and call vices in the individual the
58:49
Speaker 1: qualities which may prove detrimental to his own preservation, and
58:53
Speaker 1: virtues those which may contribute to it, in which case
58:57
Speaker 1: we should be obliged to consider him as most virtuous,
58:59
Speaker 1: who made least resistance against the simple impulses of nature.
59:03
Speaker 1: But without deviating from the usual meaning of these terms,
59:07
Speaker 1: it is proper to suspend the judgment we might form
59:09
Speaker 1: of such a situation, and be upon our guard against
59:12
Speaker 1: prejudice till the balance in hand. We have examined whether
59:16
Speaker 1: there are more virtues or vices among civilized men, or
59:20
Speaker 1: whether the improvement of their understanding is sufficient to compensate
59:24
Speaker 1: the damages which they mutually do to each other in
59:27
Speaker 1: proportion as they become better informed of the services which
59:30
Speaker 1: they ought to do, or whether, upon the whole they
59:34
Speaker 1: would not be much happier in a condition where they
59:37
Speaker 1: had nothing to fear or to hope from each other
59:39
Speaker 1: than in that where they had submitted to a universal subserviency,
59:43
Speaker 1: and have obliged themselves to depend for everything upon the
59:46
Speaker 1: goodwill of those who do not think themselves obliged to
59:49
Speaker 1: give anything in return. But above all things, let us
59:54
Speaker 1: beware concluding with Hobbes that man, as having no idea
59:57
Speaker 1: of goodness, must be naturally bad, that he is vicious
1:00:01
Speaker 1: because he does not know what virtue is that he
1:00:04
Speaker 1: always refuses to do any service to those of his
1:00:06
Speaker 1: own species, because he believes that none is due to them. That,
1:00:11
Speaker 1: in virtue of that right which he justly claims to
1:00:14
Speaker 1: everything he wants, he foolishly looks upon himself as a
1:00:17
Speaker 1: proprietor of the whole universe. Hobbes very plainly saw the
1:00:21
Speaker 1: flaws and all the modern definitions of natural right. But
1:00:25
Speaker 1: the consequences which he draws from his own definition show
1:00:29
Speaker 1: that it is in the sense he understands it equally exceptionable.
1:00:34
Speaker 1: This author, to argue from his own principles, should say
1:00:37
Speaker 1: that the state of nature, being that where the care
1:00:40
Speaker 1: of our own preservation interferes least with the preservation of others,
1:00:45
Speaker 1: was of course the most favorable to peace and most
1:00:48
Speaker 1: suitable to mankind. Whereas he advances the very reverse, in
1:00:53
Speaker 1: consequence of his having injudiciously admitted as objects of that
1:00:57
Speaker 1: care which savage man should take of his present the
1:01:01
Speaker 1: satisfaction of numberless passions, which are the work of society
1:01:05
Speaker 1: and have rendered laws necessary. A bad man says he
1:01:09
Speaker 1: is a robust child, but this is not proving a
1:01:13
Speaker 1: savage man as a robust child. And though we were
1:01:16
Speaker 1: to grant that he was, what could this philosopher infer
1:01:19
Speaker 1: from such a concession. That if man, when robust, depended
1:01:23
Speaker 1: on others as much as when feeble, there is no
1:01:26
Speaker 1: excess that he would not be guilty of. He would
1:01:28
Speaker 1: make nothing of striking his mother when she delayed ever
1:01:31
Speaker 1: so little to give him the breast. He would claw
1:01:35
Speaker 1: and bite and strangle without remorse the first of his
1:01:37
Speaker 1: younger brothers that ever so accidentally jostled or otherwise disturbed him.
1:01:43
Speaker 1: But these are two contradictory suppositions in the state of nature.
1:01:47
Speaker 1: To be robust and dependent. Man is weak when dependent,
1:01:51
Speaker 1: and his own master before he grows robust. Hobbs did
1:01:55
Speaker 1: not consider that the same cause which hinders savages for
1:01:58
Speaker 1: making use of their reason, as our journy consults pretend,
1:02:01
Speaker 1: hinders them at the same time for making an ill
1:02:04
Speaker 1: use of their faculties, as he him self pretends. So
1:02:07
Speaker 1: that we may say that savages are not bad precisely
1:02:10
Speaker 1: because they don't know what it is to be good.
1:02:13
Speaker 1: For it is neither the development of the understanding, nor
1:02:16
Speaker 1: the curb of the law, but the calmness of their
1:02:19
Speaker 1: passions and their ignorance of vice that hinders them from
1:02:22
Speaker 1: doing ill tantos plus an illus proficit vitiorum ignorantia qualm,
1:02:28
Speaker 1: and his cognito virtutis. There is besides another principle that
1:02:33
Speaker 1: has escaped Hobbes, and which having been given to man
1:02:36
Speaker 1: to moderate on certain occasions, the blind and impetuous sallies
1:02:40
Speaker 1: of self love or the desire of self preservation previous
1:02:43
Speaker 1: to the appearance of that passion, allays the ardor with
1:02:47
Speaker 1: which he naturally pursues his private welfare, by an innate
1:02:51
Speaker 1: abhorrence to seeing being suffer that resemble him. I shall
1:02:55
Speaker 1: not surely be contradicted in granting to man the only
1:02:58
Speaker 1: natural virtue which the most passionate detractor of human virtues
1:03:02
Speaker 1: could not deny him. I mean that of pity, a
1:03:06
Speaker 1: disposition suitable to creatures weak as we are, and libel
1:03:10
Speaker 1: to so many evils, A virtue so much the more
1:03:13
Speaker 1: universal and withal useful to man as it takes place
1:03:16
Speaker 1: in him of all manner of reflection, and so natural
1:03:20
Speaker 1: that the beasts themselves sometimes give evident signs of it,
1:03:24
Speaker 1: not to speak of the tenderness of mothers for their young,
1:03:27
Speaker 1: and of the dangers they face to screen them from
1:03:29
Speaker 1: danger with what reluctance or horses known to trample upon
1:03:33
Speaker 1: living bodies. One animal never passes unmoved by the dead
1:03:37
Speaker 1: carcass of another animal of the same species. There are
1:03:41
Speaker 1: even some who bestow a kind of sepulchure upon their
1:03:44
Speaker 1: dead fellows, and the mournful lowings of cattle on their
1:03:48
Speaker 1: entering the slaughter house. Publish the impression made upon them
1:03:51
Speaker 1: by the horrible spectacle they are there struck with. It
1:03:54
Speaker 1: is with pleasure we see the author of the Fable
1:03:57
Speaker 1: of the Bees forced to acknowledge man a com passionate
1:04:00
Speaker 1: and sensible being, and lay aside in the example he
1:04:04
Speaker 1: offers to confirm it his cold and subtle style, to
1:04:08
Speaker 1: place before us the pathetic picture of a man who,
1:04:11
Speaker 1: with his hands tied up, is obliged to behold a
1:04:14
Speaker 1: beast of prey, tear a child from the arms of
1:04:17
Speaker 1: his mother, and then, with his teeth grind the tender limbs,
1:04:20
Speaker 1: and with his claws rend the throbbing entrails of his
1:04:23
Speaker 1: innocent victim. What horrible emotions must not such a spectator
1:04:28
Speaker 1: experience at the sight of an event which does not
1:04:30
Speaker 1: personally concern him. What anguish must he not suffer at
1:04:34
Speaker 1: his not being able to assist the fainting mother or
1:04:37
Speaker 1: the expiring infant. Such is the pure motion of nature,
1:04:42
Speaker 1: anterior to all manner of reflection, Such the force of
1:04:46
Speaker 1: natural pity, which the most dissolute manners have as yet
1:04:49
Speaker 1: found it so difficult to extinguish. Since we every day
1:04:52
Speaker 1: see in our theatrical representation those men sympathize with the
1:04:56
Speaker 1: unfortunate and weep at their sufferings, who, if in the
1:04:59
Speaker 1: time Yarn's place, would aggravate the torments of their enemies.
1:05:04
Speaker 1: Mandeville was very sensible that men, in spite of all
1:05:07
Speaker 1: their morality, would never have been better than monsters if
1:05:10
Speaker 1: nature had not given them pity to assist reason. But
1:05:14
Speaker 1: he did not perceive that from this quality alone flow
1:05:17
Speaker 1: all the social virtues which he would dispute mankind the
1:05:20
Speaker 1: possession of. In fact, what is generosity, what clemencye? What humanity?
1:05:25
Speaker 1: But pity applied to the weak, to the guilty, or
1:05:28
Speaker 1: to the human species in general. Even benevolence and friendship,
1:05:33
Speaker 1: if we judge right, will appear the effects of a
1:05:35
Speaker 1: constant pity fixed upon a particular object. For to wish
1:05:40
Speaker 1: that a person may not suffer, What is it but
1:05:42
Speaker 1: to wish that he may be happy? Though it were true,
1:05:46
Speaker 1: the commiseration is no more than a sentiment which puts
1:05:49
Speaker 1: us in the place of him who suffers, a sentiment
1:05:52
Speaker 1: obscure but active in the savage, developed, but dormant and
1:05:56
Speaker 1: civilized man. How could this notion affect the truth of
1:05:59
Speaker 1: what I advance? But to make it more evident? In fact,
1:06:03
Speaker 1: commiseration must be so much, the more energetic, the more intimately.
1:06:07
Speaker 1: The animal that beholds any kind of distress identifies himself
1:06:10
Speaker 1: with the animal that labors under it. Now it is
1:06:13
Speaker 1: evident that this identification must have been infinitely more perfect
1:06:17
Speaker 1: in the state of nature than in the state of reason.
1:06:20
Speaker 1: It is reason that engenders self love and reflection that
1:06:23
Speaker 1: strengthens it. It is reason that makes man shrink into himself.
1:06:28
Speaker 1: It is reason that makes him keep aloof from everything
1:06:31
Speaker 1: that can trouble or afflict him. It is philosophy that
1:06:34
Speaker 1: destroys his connections with other men. It is in consequence
1:06:38
Speaker 1: of her dictates that he mutters to himself at the
1:06:40
Speaker 1: sight of another in distress, you may perish for aught.
1:06:44
Speaker 1: I care. Nothing can hurt me nothing less than those
1:06:48
Speaker 1: evils which threaten the whole species can disturb the calm
1:06:51
Speaker 1: sleep of the philosopher and force him from his bed.
1:06:55
Speaker 1: One man may, with impunity, murder another under his windows.
1:07:00
Speaker 1: He has nothing to do but clap his hands to
1:07:02
Speaker 1: his ears, argue a little with himself, to hinder nature
1:07:05
Speaker 1: that startles within him from identifying him with the unhappy sufferer.
1:07:11
Speaker 1: Savage man wants this admirable talent, and for want of
1:07:15
Speaker 1: wisdom and reason, is always ready foolishly to obey the
1:07:18
Speaker 1: first whispers of humanity. In riots and street brawls, the
1:07:22
Speaker 1: populace flock together, the prudent man sneaks off. They are
1:07:27
Speaker 1: the dregs of the people, the poor, basket and barrow
1:07:30
Speaker 1: women that part the combatants and hinder gentle folks from
1:07:34
Speaker 1: countering one another's throats. It is therefore certain that pity
1:07:39
Speaker 1: is a natural sentiment, which, by moderating in every individual
1:07:43
Speaker 1: the activity of self love, contributes to the mutual preservation
1:07:47
Speaker 1: of the whole species. It is this pity which hurries
1:07:51
Speaker 1: us without reflection to the assistance of those we see
1:07:54
Speaker 1: in distress. It is this pity which, in a state
1:07:57
Speaker 1: of nature stands for laws for manners or virtue, with
1:08:01
Speaker 1: this advantage that no one is tempted to disobey her
1:08:04
Speaker 1: sweet and gentle voice. It is this pity which will
1:08:08
Speaker 1: always hinder or robust savage from plundering a feeble child
1:08:11
Speaker 1: or informal man of the subsistence they have acquired with
1:08:15
Speaker 1: pain and difficulty, if he has but the least prospect
1:08:18
Speaker 1: of providing for himself by any other means. It is
1:08:23
Speaker 1: this pity which, instead of that sublime maxim of argumentative
1:08:26
Speaker 1: justice due to others, as you would have others do
1:08:29
Speaker 1: to you, inspires all men with that other maxim of
1:08:32
Speaker 1: natural goodness, a great deal less perfect, but perhaps more useful.
1:08:37
Speaker 1: Consult your own happiness with as little prejudice as you
1:08:40
Speaker 1: can to that of others. It is, in a word,
1:08:43
Speaker 1: in this natural sentiment, rather than in fine spun arguments,
1:08:47
Speaker 1: that we must look for the cause of that reluctance
1:08:50
Speaker 1: which every man would experience to do evil, even independently
1:08:54
Speaker 1: of the maxims of education. Though it may be the
1:08:58
Speaker 1: peculiar happiness of Soctcrates and other geniuses of this stamp
1:09:02
Speaker 1: to reason themselves into virtue, the human species would long
1:09:06
Speaker 1: ago have ceased to exist, had it depended entirely for
1:09:09
Speaker 1: its preservation on the reasonings of the individuals that compose it.
1:09:13
Speaker 1: With passions so tame and so salutary occur men rather
1:09:17
Speaker 1: wild than wicked, and more attentive to guard against mischief
1:09:21
Speaker 1: than to do any to other. Animals were not exposed
1:09:24
Speaker 1: to any dangerous dissensions, as they kept up no manner
1:09:28
Speaker 1: of correspondence with each other, and were of course strangers
1:09:31
Speaker 1: to vanity, to respect, to esteem, to contempt, as they
1:09:34
Speaker 1: had no notion of what we call mume and tomb,
1:09:37
Speaker 1: nor any true idea of justice. As they considered any
1:09:41
Speaker 1: violence they were liable to as an evil that could
1:09:43
Speaker 1: be easily repaired, and not as an injury that deserved punishment.
1:09:47
Speaker 1: And as they never so much as dreamed of revenge,
1:09:49
Speaker 1: unless perhaps mechanically and unpremeditatedly, as a dog who bites
1:09:54
Speaker 1: the stone that has been thrown at him, their disputes
1:09:57
Speaker 1: could seldom be attended with bloodshed, were they never are
1:10:00
Speaker 1: occasioned by a more considerable stake than that of subsistence.
1:10:04
Speaker 1: But there is a more dangerous subject of contention which
1:10:07
Speaker 1: I must not leave unnoticed. Among the passions which ruffle
1:10:12
Speaker 1: the heart of man. There is one of a hot
1:10:14
Speaker 1: and impetuous nature, which renders the sexes necessary to each other,
1:10:19
Speaker 1: a terrible passion, which despises all dangers, bears down all obstacles,
1:10:24
Speaker 1: and to which, in its transports it seems proper to
1:10:26
Speaker 1: destroy the human species which it is destined to preserve.
1:10:30
Speaker 1: What must become of men abandoned to this lawless and
1:10:33
Speaker 1: brutal rage, without modesty, without shame, and every day disputing
1:10:37
Speaker 1: the objects of their passion at the expense of their blood.
1:10:42
Speaker 1: We must, in the first place, allow that the more
1:10:44
Speaker 1: violent of the passions, the more necessary are laws to
1:10:47
Speaker 1: restrain them. But besides that, the disorders and the crimes
1:10:51
Speaker 1: to which these passions daily give rise among us sufficiently
1:10:54
Speaker 1: grow of the insufficiency of laws for that purpose. We
1:10:57
Speaker 1: would do well to look back a little further and
1:10:59
Speaker 1: again examine if these evils did not spring up with
1:11:02
Speaker 1: the laws themselves. For at this rate, though the laws
1:11:06
Speaker 1: were capable of oppressing these evils, it is the least
1:11:09
Speaker 1: that might be expected from them, seeing it is no
1:11:11
Speaker 1: more than stopping the progress of a mischief which they
1:11:14
Speaker 1: themselves have produced. Let us begin by distinguishing between what
1:11:19
Speaker 1: is moral and what is physical, and the passion called love.
1:11:24
Speaker 1: The physical part of it is that general desire which
1:11:27
Speaker 1: prompts the sexes to unite with each other. The moral
1:11:29
Speaker 1: part is that which determines that desire and fixes it
1:11:32
Speaker 1: upon a particular object to the exclusion of all others,
1:11:36
Speaker 1: or at least gives it a greater degree of energy
1:11:38
Speaker 1: for this preferred object. Now, it is easy to perceive
1:11:41
Speaker 1: that the moral part of love is a factitious sentiment,
1:11:45
Speaker 1: engendered by society and cried up by the women with
1:11:48
Speaker 1: great care and address, in order to establish their empire
1:11:51
Speaker 1: and secure command to that sex which ought to obey.
1:11:55
Speaker 1: This sentiment, being founded on certain notions of beauty and
1:11:58
Speaker 1: merit which are savage is not capable of having, and
1:12:01
Speaker 1: upon comparisons which he is not capable of making, can
1:12:05
Speaker 1: scarcely exist in him. For as his mind was never
1:12:09
Speaker 1: in a condition to form abstract ideas of regularity and proportion,
1:12:13
Speaker 1: neither is his heart susceptible of sentiments of admiration and love, which,
1:12:17
Speaker 1: even without our perceiving it, are produced by our application
1:12:21
Speaker 1: of these ideas. He listens solely to the dispositions implanted
1:12:26
Speaker 1: in him by nature and not to taste which he
1:12:28
Speaker 1: never was in a way of acquiring. And every woman
1:12:31
Speaker 1: answers his purpose confined entirely to what is physical in love,
1:12:36
Speaker 1: and happy enough not to know these preferences, which sharpen
1:12:40
Speaker 1: the appetite for it, at the same time that they
1:12:42
Speaker 1: increase the difficulty of satisfying such appetite. Men in a
1:12:46
Speaker 1: state of nature must be subject to fewer and less
1:12:49
Speaker 1: violent fits of that passion, and of course there must
1:12:52
Speaker 1: be fewer and less violent disputes among them in consequence
1:12:55
Speaker 1: of it. The imagination which causes so many ravages of
1:12:59
Speaker 1: mine us never speaks to the heart of savages, who
1:13:03
Speaker 1: peaceably wait for the impulses of nature, yield to these
1:13:06
Speaker 1: impulses without choice, and with more pleasure than fury, and
1:13:10
Speaker 1: whose desires never outlive their necessity for the thing desired. Nothing, therefore,
1:13:16
Speaker 1: can be more evident than that it is society alone
1:13:19
Speaker 1: which has added even to love itself, as well as
1:13:22
Speaker 1: to all the other passions that impetuous ardor which so
1:13:26
Speaker 1: often renders its fatal to mankind. And it is so
1:13:29
Speaker 1: much the more ridiculous to represent savages constantly murdering each
1:13:34
Speaker 1: other to glut their brutality, as this opinion is diametrically
1:13:37
Speaker 1: opposite to experience, and the Caribbeans, the people in the
1:13:41
Speaker 1: world who have as yet deviated least from the state
1:13:44
Speaker 1: of nature, are, to all intents and purposes, the most
1:13:47
Speaker 1: peaceable in their amors, and the least subject to jealousy,
1:13:51
Speaker 1: though they live in a burning climate, which seems always
1:13:54
Speaker 1: to add considerably to the activity of these passions. As
1:13:59
Speaker 1: to the inductions which may be drawn in respect to
1:14:02
Speaker 1: several species of animals from the battles of the males,
1:14:05
Speaker 1: who in all seasons cover our poultry yards with blood,
1:14:10
Speaker 1: and in spring particularly cause our force to ring again
1:14:13
Speaker 1: with the noise they make in disputing their females, we
1:14:16
Speaker 1: must begin by excluding all those species where nature has
1:14:20
Speaker 1: evidently established and the relative power of the sexes relations
1:14:24
Speaker 1: different from those which exist among us. Thus, from the
1:14:28
Speaker 1: battle of cocks we can form no induction that will
1:14:30
Speaker 1: affect the human species. In the species where the proportion
1:14:35
Speaker 1: is better observed, these battles must be owing entirely to
1:14:38
Speaker 1: the fewness of the females compared with the males, or
1:14:41
Speaker 1: which is all one, to the exclusive intervals during which
1:14:44
Speaker 1: the females constantly refuse the addresses of the males. For
1:14:48
Speaker 1: if the female admits the male but two months in
1:14:51
Speaker 1: the year, it is all the same as if the
1:14:53
Speaker 1: number of females were five to six less than what
1:14:56
Speaker 1: it is now. Neither of these cases is applicable to
1:14:59
Speaker 1: the hugehuman species, where the number of females generally surpasses
1:15:03
Speaker 1: that of the males, and where it has never been
1:15:06
Speaker 1: observed that, even among savages, the females had, like those
1:15:09
Speaker 1: of other animals, stated times of passion and indifference. Besides,
1:15:14
Speaker 1: among several of these animals, the whole species takes fire
1:15:18
Speaker 1: all at once, and for some days nothing is to
1:15:20
Speaker 1: be seen among them but confusion, tumult, disorder, and bloodshed,
1:15:25
Speaker 1: a state unknown to the human species, where love is
1:15:27
Speaker 1: never periodical. We can not therefore conclude from the battles
1:15:31
Speaker 1: of certain animals for the possession of their females that
1:15:34
Speaker 1: the same would be the case of man in a
1:15:36
Speaker 1: state of nature. And though we might, as these contests
1:15:40
Speaker 1: do not destroy the other species, there is at least
1:15:43
Speaker 1: equal room to think they would not be fatal to ours. Nay,
1:15:47
Speaker 1: it is very probable that they would cause fewer ravages
1:15:51
Speaker 1: than they do in society. Especially in those countries where morality,
1:15:55
Speaker 1: being as yet held in some esteem, the jealousy of
1:15:58
Speaker 1: lovers and the vengeance of husbands every day produced duels, murders,
1:16:03
Speaker 1: and even worse crimes, where the duty of an eternal
1:16:07
Speaker 1: fidelity serves only to propagate adultery, and the very laws
1:16:11
Speaker 1: of continence and honor necessarily contribute to the increase of
1:16:15
Speaker 1: dissoluteness and multiply abortions. Let us conclude that savage man
1:16:21
Speaker 1: wandering about in the forests, without industry, without speech, without
1:16:26
Speaker 1: any fixed residence, an equal stranger to war in every
1:16:29
Speaker 1: social connection, without standing in any shape in need of
1:16:33
Speaker 1: his fellows, as well as without any desire of hurting them,
1:16:37
Speaker 1: and perhaps even without ever distinguishing them individually from one another,
1:16:42
Speaker 1: subject to few passions, and finding in himself all he wants,
1:16:46
Speaker 1: let us I say, conclude that savage man thus circumstanced
1:16:50
Speaker 1: had no knowledge or sentiment but such as are proper
1:16:54
Speaker 1: to that condition, that he was alone sensible of his
1:16:57
Speaker 1: real necessities, took notice of nothing but what it was
1:17:01
Speaker 1: his interest to see, and that his understanding made as
1:17:04
Speaker 1: little progress as his vanity. If he happened to make
1:17:08
Speaker 1: any discovery he could the less communicate it, as he
1:17:11
Speaker 1: did not even know his children. The art perished with
1:17:15
Speaker 1: the inventor. There is neither education nor improvement. Generations succeeded
1:17:21
Speaker 1: generations to no purpose, and as all constantly set out
1:17:25
Speaker 1: from the same point, whole centuries rolled on. In the
1:17:28
Speaker 1: rudeness and barbarity of the first age, the species was
1:17:32
Speaker 1: grown old, while the individual still remained in a state
1:17:35
Speaker 1: of childhood. If I have enlarged so much upon the
1:17:40
Speaker 1: supposition of this primitive condition, it is because I thought
1:17:43
Speaker 1: it my duty, considering what ancient errors and inveterate prejudices
1:17:48
Speaker 1: I have to extirpate, to dig to the very roots
1:17:51
Speaker 1: and show in a true picture of the state of nature,
1:17:54
Speaker 1: how much even natural inequality falls short in the state
1:17:58
Speaker 1: of that reality and inflaences which our writers ascribe to it.
1:18:03
Speaker 1: In fact, we may easily perceive that among the differences
1:18:07
Speaker 1: which distinguish men several paths for natural which are merely
1:18:10
Speaker 1: the work of habit and the different kinds of life
1:18:13
Speaker 1: adopted by man living in a social way. Thus, a
1:18:17
Speaker 1: robust or delicate constitution, and the strength and weakness which
1:18:21
Speaker 1: depend upon it are oftener produced by the hardy or
1:18:25
Speaker 1: effeminate manner in which a man has been brought up
1:18:28
Speaker 1: than by the primitive constitution of his body, it is
1:18:32
Speaker 1: the same. Thus, in regard to the forces of the mind,
1:18:35
Speaker 1: an education not only produces a difference between those minds
1:18:39
Speaker 1: which are cultivated and those which are not, but even
1:18:42
Speaker 1: increases that which is found among the first in proportion
1:18:45
Speaker 1: to their culture. For let a giant and a dwarf
1:18:49
Speaker 1: set out in the same path. The giant, at every
1:18:51
Speaker 1: step will acquire a new advantage over the dwarf. Now,
1:18:55
Speaker 1: if we compare the prodigious variety in the education and
1:18:59
Speaker 1: manner of life of the different orders of men in
1:19:02
Speaker 1: a civil state with the simplicity and uniformity that prevails
1:19:06
Speaker 1: in the animal and savage life, where all the individuals
1:19:10
Speaker 1: make use of the same ailments, live in the same manner,
1:19:13
Speaker 1: and do exactly the same things, we shall easily conceive
1:19:17
Speaker 1: how much the difference between man and man in the
1:19:20
Speaker 1: state of nature must be less than in the state
1:19:22
Speaker 1: of society, and how much every inequality of institution must
1:19:27
Speaker 1: increase the natural inequalities of the human species. But though nature,
1:19:33
Speaker 1: in the distribution of her gifts, should really affect all
1:19:36
Speaker 1: the preferences that are ascribed to her. What advantage could
1:19:40
Speaker 1: the most favored derive from her partiality to the prejudice
1:19:43
Speaker 1: of others? In a state of things which scarce admitted
1:19:46
Speaker 1: any kind of relation between her pupils. Of what service
1:19:50
Speaker 1: can beauty be where there is no love? What will
1:19:53
Speaker 1: wit avail? People who don't speak or craft, those who
1:19:57
Speaker 1: have no affairs to transact, are constantly crying out that
1:20:02
Speaker 1: the strongest would oppress the weakest. But let them explain
1:20:05
Speaker 1: what they mean by the word oppression. One man will
1:20:08
Speaker 1: rule with violence, another will groan under a constant subjection
1:20:12
Speaker 1: to all his caprices. This is indeed precisely what I
1:20:15
Speaker 1: observe among us. But I don't see how it can
1:20:18
Speaker 1: be said of savage men, into whose heads it would
1:20:22
Speaker 1: be a harder matter to drive even the meaning of
1:20:24
Speaker 1: the words domination and servitude. One man might indeed seize
1:20:29
Speaker 1: on the fruits which another had gathered, on the game
1:20:32
Speaker 1: which another had killed, on the cavern which another had
1:20:35
Speaker 1: occupied for shelter. But how is it possible he should
1:20:39
Speaker 1: ever exact obedience from him? And what chains of dependence
1:20:43
Speaker 1: can there be among men who possess nothing? If I
1:20:46
Speaker 1: am driven from one tree, I have nothing to do
1:20:49
Speaker 1: but look out for another. If one place has made
1:20:52
Speaker 1: it uneasy to me, what can hinder me from taking
1:20:55
Speaker 1: up my quarters elsewhere? But suppose I should meet a
1:21:00
Speaker 1: man so much superior to me in strength and withal
1:21:03
Speaker 1: so wicked, so lazy, and so barbarous as to oblige
1:21:07
Speaker 1: me to provide for his substance while he remains idle.
1:21:11
Speaker 1: He must resolve not to take his eyes from me
1:21:13
Speaker 1: a single moment, to bind me fast before he can
1:21:16
Speaker 1: take the least nap, lest I should kill him or
1:21:19
Speaker 1: give him the slip during his sleep. That is to say,
1:21:23
Speaker 1: he must expose himself voluntarily to much greater troubles than
1:21:26
Speaker 1: what he seeks to avoid than any he gives me.
1:21:30
Speaker 1: And after all, let him abate ever so little of
1:21:33
Speaker 1: his vigilance. Let him, at some sudden noise but turn
1:21:37
Speaker 1: his head another way. I am already buried in the forest.
1:21:40
Speaker 1: My fetters are broke, and he never sees me again.
1:21:44
Speaker 1: But without insisting any longer upon these details, everyone must
1:21:49
Speaker 1: see that as the bonds of servitude are formed merely
1:21:52
Speaker 1: by the mutual dependence of men one upon another, and
1:21:56
Speaker 1: there reciprocal necessities which unite them. It is impossible for
1:21:59
Speaker 1: one man to enslave another without having first reduced him
1:22:03
Speaker 1: to a condition in which he cannot live without the
1:22:06
Speaker 1: enslaver's assistance, a condition which, as it does not exist
1:22:10
Speaker 1: in a state of nature, must leave every man his
1:22:13
Speaker 1: own master, and render the law of the strongest altogether
1:22:17
Speaker 1: vain and useless. Having proved that the inequality which may
1:22:22
Speaker 1: subsist between man and man in a state of nature
1:22:25
Speaker 1: is almost imperceivable, and that it has very little influence,
1:22:29
Speaker 1: I must now proceed to show its origin and trace
1:22:32
Speaker 1: its progress in the successive developments of the human mind.
1:22:37
Speaker 1: After having showed that perfectibility, the social virtues and the
1:22:41
Speaker 1: other faculties which natural man had received in potentia could
1:22:46
Speaker 1: never be developed of themselves. That for that purpose there
1:22:49
Speaker 1: is a necessity for the fortuitous concurrence of several foreign causes,
1:22:54
Speaker 1: which might never happen, and without which he must have
1:22:56
Speaker 1: eternally remained in his primitive condition. I must persus seed
1:23:00
Speaker 1: to consider and bring together the different accidents which may
1:23:03
Speaker 1: have perfected the human understanding by debasing the species, render
1:23:08
Speaker 1: a being wicked, by rendering him sociable, and from so
1:23:11
Speaker 1: remote a term bring man at last in the world
1:23:14
Speaker 1: to the point in which we now see them. I
1:23:17
Speaker 1: must own that, as the events I am about to
1:23:20
Speaker 1: describe might have happened many different ways, my choice of
1:23:24
Speaker 1: these I shall assign, can be grounded on nothing but
1:23:26
Speaker 1: mere conjecture. But besides these conjectures becoming reasons when they
1:23:30
Speaker 1: are not only the most probable that can be drawn
1:23:33
Speaker 1: from the nature of things, but the only means we
1:23:35
Speaker 1: can have of discovering truth. The consequences I mean to
1:23:39
Speaker 1: deduce from mine will not be merely conjectural, since on
1:23:43
Speaker 1: the principles I have just established, it is impossible to
1:23:47
Speaker 1: form any other system that would not supply me with
1:23:50
Speaker 1: the same results, and from which I might not draw
1:23:52
Speaker 1: the same conclusions. This will authorize me to be the
1:23:56
Speaker 1: more concise in my reflections on the manner in which
1:23:59
Speaker 1: the last gaps of time makes amends for the little
1:24:02
Speaker 1: versimilitude of events, On the surprising power of very trivial
1:24:06
Speaker 1: causes when they act without intermission, On the impossibility there is,
1:24:11
Speaker 1: on the one hand, of destroying certain hypotheses, if on
1:24:15
Speaker 1: the other we cannot give them the degree of certainty
1:24:18
Speaker 1: which facts must be allowed to possess. On its being.
1:24:21
Speaker 1: The business of history when two facts are proposed as
1:24:25
Speaker 1: real to be connected by a chain of intermediate facts
1:24:29
Speaker 1: which are either unknown or considered as such, to furnish
1:24:32
Speaker 1: such facts as may actually connect them, and the business
1:24:36
Speaker 1: of philosophy when history is silent to point out similar
1:24:40
Speaker 1: facts which may answer the same purpose. In fine on
1:24:43
Speaker 1: the privilege of similitude in regard to events, to reduce
1:24:48
Speaker 1: facts to a much smaller number of different classes than
1:24:52
Speaker 1: is generally imagined. It suffices me to offer these objects
1:24:56
Speaker 1: to the consideration of my judges. It suffices me to
1:24:59
Speaker 1: have conducted by inquiry in such a manner as to
1:25:02
Speaker 1: save common readers the trouble of considering them. End of discourse,
1:25:10
Speaker 1: first part, section five of the Discourse on Inequality by
1:25:22
Speaker 1: Jean Jacques Rousseau. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox
1:25:28
Speaker 1: recordings are in the public domain. For more information or
1:25:32
Speaker 1: to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. This reading is
1:25:38
Speaker 1: by Eric Jonas. A Discourse upon the Origin and the
1:25:41
Speaker 1: foundation of the Inequality among Mankind by Jean Jacques Rousseau.
1:25:47
Speaker 1: Discourse second part Section one. The first man who, after
1:25:54
Speaker 1: enclosing a piece of ground took it into his head
1:25:56
Speaker 1: to say this is mine, and found people simple enough
1:26:00
Speaker 1: to believe him was the true founder of civil society.
1:26:05
Speaker 1: How many crimes, how many wars, how many murders, how
1:26:08
Speaker 1: many misfortunes and horrors would that man have saved? The
1:26:12
Speaker 1: human species? Who pulling up the stakes or filling up
1:26:15
Speaker 1: the ditches should have cried to his fellows. Be sure
1:26:19
Speaker 1: not to listen to this imposture. You are lost if
1:26:22
Speaker 1: you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally
1:26:25
Speaker 1: to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. But
1:26:29
Speaker 1: it is highly probable that things were now come to
1:26:32
Speaker 1: such a pass that they could not continue much longer
1:26:35
Speaker 1: in the same way. For as this idea of property
1:26:38
Speaker 1: depends on several prior ideas, which could only spring up gradually,
1:26:43
Speaker 1: one after another, it was not formed all at once
1:26:46
Speaker 1: in the human mind. Men must have made great progress.
1:26:49
Speaker 1: They must have acquired a great stock of industry and knowledge,
1:26:53
Speaker 1: and transmitted and increased it from age to age before
1:26:56
Speaker 1: they could arrive at this last term of the state
1:26:58
Speaker 1: of nature. Let us therefore take up things a little
1:27:02
Speaker 1: higher and collect into one point of view and in
1:27:05
Speaker 1: their most natural order. This slow succession of events and
1:27:09
Speaker 1: mental improvements. The first sentiment of man was that of
1:27:14
Speaker 1: his existence, his first care that of preserving it. The
1:27:18
Speaker 1: productions of the earth yielded him all the assistance he required.
1:27:22
Speaker 1: Instinct prompted him to make use of them. Among the
1:27:26
Speaker 1: various appetites which made him, at different times experience different
1:27:30
Speaker 1: modes of existence, there was one that excited him to
1:27:33
Speaker 1: perpetuate his species. And this blind propensity, quite void of
1:27:38
Speaker 1: anything like pure love or affection, produced nothing but an
1:27:41
Speaker 1: act that was merely animal. The present heat. Once allaid,
1:27:46
Speaker 1: the sexes took no further notice of each other, and
1:27:48
Speaker 1: even the child ceased to have any tie to his
1:27:51
Speaker 1: mother the moment he ceased to want her assistance. Such
1:27:55
Speaker 1: was the condition of the infant man. Such was the
1:27:58
Speaker 1: life of an animal, confine at first to pure sensations,
1:28:02
Speaker 1: and so far from harboring any thought of forcing her
1:28:05
Speaker 1: gifts from nature, that he scarcely availed himself of those
1:28:09
Speaker 1: which she offered to him of her own accord. But
1:28:12
Speaker 1: difficulty soon arose, and there is a necessity for learning
1:28:16
Speaker 1: how to surmount them. The height of some trees which
1:28:20
Speaker 1: prevented his reaching their fruits. The competition of other animals
1:28:24
Speaker 1: equally fond of the same fruits, the fierceness of many
1:28:27
Speaker 1: that even aimed at his life. These were so many
1:28:30
Speaker 1: circumstances which obliged him to apply to bodily exercise. There
1:28:35
Speaker 1: is a necessity for becoming active, swift, footed, and sturdy
1:28:39
Speaker 1: in battle. The natural arms, which are stones in the
1:28:42
Speaker 1: branches of trees, soon offered themselves to his assistance. He
1:28:47
Speaker 1: learned to surmount the obstacles of nature, to contend, in
1:28:51
Speaker 1: the case of necessity with other animals, to dispute his
1:28:54
Speaker 1: subsistence even with other men, or indemnify himself for the
1:28:59
Speaker 1: loss of whatever he found found himself obliged to part
1:29:01
Speaker 1: with the strongest in proportion. As the human species grew
1:29:06
Speaker 1: more numerous and extended itself, its pains likewise multiplied and increased.
1:29:12
Speaker 1: The difference of soils, climates, and seasons might have forced
1:29:15
Speaker 1: men to observe some difference in their way of living.
1:29:19
Speaker 1: Bad harvests, long and severe winters, and scorching summers, which
1:29:23
Speaker 1: parched up all the fruits of the earth, required extraordinary
1:29:26
Speaker 1: exertions of industry on the seashore and the banks of rivers.
1:29:31
Speaker 1: They invented the line and the hook, and became fishermen
1:29:34
Speaker 1: and achthophagus. In the forests, they made themselves bows and arrows,
1:29:39
Speaker 1: and became huntsmen and warriors. In the cold countries, they
1:29:42
Speaker 1: covered themselves with the skins of the beasts they had killed.
1:29:46
Speaker 1: Thunder of volcano, or some happy accident made them acquainted
1:29:50
Speaker 1: with fire, a new resource against the rigors of winter.
1:29:54
Speaker 1: They discovered the method of preserving this element, then that
1:29:58
Speaker 1: of reproducing it, and lastly the way of preparing it
1:30:01
Speaker 1: with the flesh of animals, which heretofore they devoured raw
1:30:05
Speaker 1: from the carcass. This reiterated application of various beings to
1:30:09
Speaker 1: himself and to one another must have naturally engendered in
1:30:14
Speaker 1: the mind of man the idea of certain relations. These
1:30:17
Speaker 1: relations which we expressed by the words great, little, strong, weak, swift, slow, fearful, bold,
1:30:24
Speaker 1: in the like compared occasionally, and almost without thinking of it,
1:30:29
Speaker 1: produced in him some kind of reflection, or rather a
1:30:32
Speaker 1: mechanical prudence, which pointed out to him the precautions most
1:30:37
Speaker 1: essential to his preservation and safety. The new lights resulting
1:30:42
Speaker 1: from this development increased his superiority over other animals by
1:30:46
Speaker 1: making him sensible of it. He laid himself out to
1:30:50
Speaker 1: ensnare them. He played them a thousand tricks, and though
1:30:54
Speaker 1: several surpassed him in strength or in swiftness, he in
1:30:58
Speaker 1: time became the master of those that could be of
1:31:00
Speaker 1: any service to him, and a sore enemy to those
1:31:03
Speaker 1: that could do him any mischief. Tis thus that the
1:31:06
Speaker 1: first look he gave into himself produced the first emotion
1:31:09
Speaker 1: of pride in him. Tis thus that at a time
1:31:13
Speaker 1: he scarce knew how to distinguish between the different ranks
1:31:15
Speaker 1: of existence. By attributing to his species the first rank
1:31:19
Speaker 1: among animals in general, he prepared himself at a distance
1:31:23
Speaker 1: to pretend to it as an individual among those of
1:31:26
Speaker 1: his own species. In particular, though other men were not
1:31:30
Speaker 1: to him what they are to us, and he had
1:31:34
Speaker 1: scarce more intercourse with them than with other animals, they
1:31:37
Speaker 1: were not overlooked in his observations. The conformities which in
1:31:42
Speaker 1: time he might discover between them and between himself and
1:31:45
Speaker 1: his female made him judge of those he did not perceive,
1:31:49
Speaker 1: and seeing that they all behaved as himself would have
1:31:53
Speaker 1: done in similar circumstances, he concluded that their manner of
1:31:56
Speaker 1: thinking and willing was quite conformable. To his own, and
1:32:00
Speaker 1: that this important truth, when once engraved deeply on his mind,
1:32:04
Speaker 1: made him follow by a presentiment as sure as any logic,
1:32:08
Speaker 1: and withal much quicker, the best rules of conduct, which,
1:32:12
Speaker 1: for the sake of his own safety and advantage, it
1:32:15
Speaker 1: was proper he should observe towards them. Instructed by experience
1:32:20
Speaker 1: that the love of happiness is the sole principle of
1:32:22
Speaker 1: all human actions, he found himself in a condition to
1:32:26
Speaker 1: distinguish the few cases in which common interest might authorize
1:32:30
Speaker 1: him to build upon the assistance of his fellows, and
1:32:33
Speaker 1: those still fewer in which a competition of interests might
1:32:36
Speaker 1: justly render it suspected. In the first case, he united
1:32:41
Speaker 1: with them in the same flock, or at most by
1:32:43
Speaker 1: the same kind of free association, which obliged none of
1:32:47
Speaker 1: its members, and lasted no longer than the transitory necessity
1:32:51
Speaker 1: that had given birth to it. In the second case,
1:32:54
Speaker 1: everyone aimed at his own private advantage, either by open force,
1:32:58
Speaker 1: if he found himself strong enough, or by cunning an
1:33:01
Speaker 1: address if he thought himself too weak to use violence.
1:33:05
Speaker 1: Such was the manner in which men might have insensibly
1:33:08
Speaker 1: acquired some gross idea of their mutual engagements in the
1:33:12
Speaker 1: advantage of fulfilling them. But this only as far as
1:33:15
Speaker 1: their present and sensible interest required. For as to foresight,
1:33:20
Speaker 1: they were utter strangers to it, and far from troubling
1:33:23
Speaker 1: their heads about a distant futurity, they Scarce thought of
1:33:27
Speaker 1: the day following was a dear to be taken. Every
1:33:30
Speaker 1: one saw that to succeed he must faithfully stand to
1:33:34
Speaker 1: his post. But suppose a hare to have slipped by
1:33:37
Speaker 1: within reach of any one of them, it is not
1:33:39
Speaker 1: to be doubted. But he pursued it without scruple, and
1:33:43
Speaker 1: when he had seized his prey, never approached himself, with
1:33:46
Speaker 1: having made his companions miss theirs. We may easily conceive
1:33:51
Speaker 1: that such an intercourse Scarce required a more refined language
1:33:55
Speaker 1: than that of crows and monkeys, which flocked together almost
1:33:58
Speaker 1: in the same manner, in articulate exclamations, a great many gestures,
1:34:03
Speaker 1: and some imitative sounds, must have been for a long
1:34:06
Speaker 1: time the universal language of mankind, and by joining to these,
1:34:10
Speaker 1: in every country some articulate and conventional sounds, of which,
1:34:14
Speaker 1: as I have already hinted, it is not very easy
1:34:18
Speaker 1: to explain the institution there arose particular languages. But rude, imperfect,
1:34:24
Speaker 1: and such nearly as are to be found at this
1:34:26
Speaker 1: day among several savage nations. My pens straightened by the
1:34:31
Speaker 1: rapidity of time, the abundance of things I have to say,
1:34:34
Speaker 1: and the almost insensible progress of the first improvements, flies
1:34:38
Speaker 1: like an arrow over numberless ages. For the slower the
1:34:41
Speaker 1: succession of events, the quicker I may allow myself to
1:34:44
Speaker 1: be in relating them at length. These first improvements enabled
1:34:49
Speaker 1: man to improve at a greater rate. Industry grew perfect
1:34:53
Speaker 1: in proportion as the mind became more enlightened. Men, soon
1:34:57
Speaker 1: ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree or take
1:35:00
Speaker 1: shelter in the first cavern, lit upon some hard and
1:35:04
Speaker 1: sharp kinds of stone, resembling spades or hatchets, and employed
1:35:08
Speaker 1: them to dig the ground, cut down the trees, and
1:35:11
Speaker 1: with the branches built huts, which they afterwards bethought themselves
1:35:15
Speaker 1: of plastering over with clay or dirt. This was the
1:35:18
Speaker 1: epoch of a first revolution, which produced the establishment and
1:35:22
Speaker 1: distinction of families, and which introduced a species of property,
1:35:26
Speaker 1: and along with it perhaps a thousand quarrels and battles.
1:35:30
Speaker 1: As the strongest, however, were probably the first to make
1:35:33
Speaker 1: themselves cabins which they knew they were able to defend.
1:35:37
Speaker 1: We may conclude that the weak found it much shorter
1:35:40
Speaker 1: and safer to imitate than to attempt to dislodge them.
1:35:44
Speaker 1: And as to those who were already provided with cabins,
1:35:48
Speaker 1: no one could have any great temptation to seize upon
1:35:51
Speaker 1: that of his neighbor, not so much because it did
1:35:53
Speaker 1: not belong to him, as because it could be of
1:35:56
Speaker 1: no service to him, And as besides, to make himself
1:35:59
Speaker 1: master of it, he must expose himself to a very
1:36:02
Speaker 1: sharp conflict with the present occupiers. The first developments of
1:36:06
Speaker 1: the heart were the effects of a new situation which
1:36:09
Speaker 1: united husbands and wives, parents and children under one roof.
1:36:14
Speaker 1: The habit of living together gave birth to the sweetest
1:36:16
Speaker 1: sentiments the human species. As acquainted with conjugal and paternal love.
1:36:22
Speaker 1: Every family became a little society, so much the more
1:36:26
Speaker 1: firmly united as a mutual attachment in liberty were the
1:36:29
Speaker 1: only bonds of it. And it was now that the sexes,
1:36:32
Speaker 1: whose way of life had been hitherto the same, began
1:36:35
Speaker 1: to adopt different manners and customs. The women became more
1:36:39
Speaker 1: sedentary and accustomed themselves to stay at home and look
1:36:42
Speaker 1: after their children, while the men rambled abroad in quest
1:36:45
Speaker 1: of subsistence for the whole family. The two sexes, likewise,
1:36:49
Speaker 1: by living a little more at their ease, began to
1:36:52
Speaker 1: lose somewhat of their usual ferocity and sturdiness. But if
1:36:56
Speaker 1: on the one hand, individuals became less able to engage
1:37:00
Speaker 1: with wild beasts, they, on the other, were more easily
1:37:03
Speaker 1: got together to make a common resistance against them. In
1:37:07
Speaker 1: this new state of things, the simplicity and solitariness of
1:37:11
Speaker 1: man's life, the limitedness of his wants, and the instruments
1:37:15
Speaker 1: which he had invented to satisfy them, leaving him a
1:37:18
Speaker 1: great deal of leisure, he employed it to supply himself
1:37:21
Speaker 1: with several conveniences unknown to his ancestors. And this was
1:37:25
Speaker 1: the first yoke he inadvertently imposed upon himself, and the
1:37:29
Speaker 1: first source of mischief which he prepared for his children.
1:37:33
Speaker 1: For besides continuing in this manner to soften both body
1:37:36
Speaker 1: and mind, these conveniences, having through use, lost almost all
1:37:40
Speaker 1: their aptness to please, and even degenerated into real wants,
1:37:44
Speaker 1: the privation of them became far more intolerable than the
1:37:47
Speaker 1: possession of them. Had been agreeable to lose them, was
1:37:51
Speaker 1: a misfortune to possess them no happiness. Here we may
1:37:55
Speaker 1: a little better discover how the use of speech insensibly
1:37:59
Speaker 1: commenced or improves in the bosom of every family, and
1:38:03
Speaker 1: may likewise form conjectures concerning the manner in which diverse
1:38:07
Speaker 1: particular causes might have propagated language and accelerated its progress
1:38:11
Speaker 1: by rendering it every day more and more necessary. Great
1:38:15
Speaker 1: inundations or earthquakes surrounded inhabited districts with water or precipice.
1:38:20
Speaker 1: Portions of the continent were, by revolutions of the globe
1:38:24
Speaker 1: torn off and split into islands. It is obvious that
1:38:27
Speaker 1: among men thus collected and forced to live together, a
1:38:31
Speaker 1: common idiom must have started up much sooner than among
1:38:34
Speaker 1: those who freely wandered through the forests of the mainland.
1:38:38
Speaker 1: Thus it is very possible that the inhabitants of the
1:38:42
Speaker 1: islands formed in this manner after their first essays and
1:38:45
Speaker 1: navigation brought among us the use of speech. And it
1:38:49
Speaker 1: is very probable at least that society and languages commenced
1:38:52
Speaker 1: in islands, and even acquired perfection there before the inhabitants
1:38:56
Speaker 1: of the continent knew anything of either. Everything now begins
1:39:01
Speaker 1: to wear a new aspect. Those who heretofore wandered through
1:39:04
Speaker 1: the woods, by taking a more settled way of life,
1:39:08
Speaker 1: gradually flock together, coalesce into several separate bodies, and at
1:39:13
Speaker 1: length form in every country distinct nations, united in character
1:39:17
Speaker 1: and manners, not by any laws or regulations, but by
1:39:20
Speaker 1: a uniform manner of life, a sameness of provisions, and
1:39:24
Speaker 1: the common influence of the climate. A permanent neighborhood must
1:39:28
Speaker 1: at last infallibly create some connection between different families. The
1:39:33
Speaker 1: transitory commerce required by nature soon produced, among the youth
1:39:37
Speaker 1: of both sexes living in contiguous cabins of another kind
1:39:41
Speaker 1: of commerce, which, besides being equally agreeable, is rendered more
1:39:45
Speaker 1: durable by mutual intercourse. Men begin to consider different objects
1:39:50
Speaker 1: and to make comparisons. They insensibly acquire ideas of merit
1:39:54
Speaker 1: and beauty, and these soon produce sentiments of preference. By
1:39:58
Speaker 1: seeing each other off, they contract a habit which makes
1:40:02
Speaker 1: it painful not to see each other. Always tender and
1:40:05
Speaker 1: agreeable sentiments steal into the soul, and are by the
1:40:09
Speaker 1: smallest opposition wound up into the most impetuous fury. Jealousy
1:40:14
Speaker 1: kindles with love. Discord, triumphs, and the gentlest of passions
1:40:18
Speaker 1: require sacrifices of human blood to appease it. In proportion,
1:40:23
Speaker 1: as ideas and sentiments succeed each other, and the head
1:40:26
Speaker 1: and the heart exercise themselves. Men continue to shake off
1:40:30
Speaker 1: their original wildness, and their connections become more intimate and extensive.
1:40:35
Speaker 1: They now begin to assemble round a great tree, singing
1:40:38
Speaker 1: and dancing. The genuine offspring of love and leisure become
1:40:41
Speaker 1: the amusement, or rather the occupation of the men and
1:40:44
Speaker 1: women free from care. Thus gathered together, everyone begins to
1:40:49
Speaker 1: survey the rest and wishes to be surveyed himself, and
1:40:52
Speaker 1: public esteem acquires a value. He who sings or dances best,
1:40:57
Speaker 1: the handsomest, the strongest, the most dexterous, the most eloquent,
1:41:01
Speaker 1: comes to be the most respected. This was the first
1:41:03
Speaker 1: step towards inequality, and at the same time towards weis
1:41:08
Speaker 1: from these first preferences that proceeded on one side vanity
1:41:12
Speaker 1: and contempt on the other, envy and shame, and the
1:41:16
Speaker 1: fermentation raised by these new levens at length produced combinations
1:41:20
Speaker 1: fatal to happiness and innocence. Men no sooner began to
1:41:24
Speaker 1: set upon each other and know what esteem was, than
1:41:28
Speaker 1: each laid claim to it, and it was no longer
1:41:31
Speaker 1: safe for any man to refuse it to another. Hence
1:41:34
Speaker 1: the first duties of civility and politeness even among savages,
1:41:38
Speaker 1: and hence every voluntary injury became an affront as besides
1:41:42
Speaker 1: the mischief which resulted from it. As an injury, the
1:41:45
Speaker 1: party offended was sure to find a contempt for his
1:41:48
Speaker 1: person more intolerable than the mischief itself. It was thus
1:41:53
Speaker 1: that every man, punishing the contempt expressed for him by
1:41:56
Speaker 1: others in proportion to the value he set upon himself,
1:41:59
Speaker 1: the effects of revenge became terrible, and men learned to
1:42:03
Speaker 1: be sanguinary and cruel. Such precisely was the degree attained
1:42:07
Speaker 1: by most of the savage nations which whom we are acquainted.
1:42:11
Speaker 1: And it is for want of sufficiently distinguishing ideas and
1:42:14
Speaker 1: observing at how great a distance these people were from
1:42:17
Speaker 1: the first state of nature, that so many authors have
1:42:20
Speaker 1: hastily concluded that man is naturally cruel and requires a
1:42:24
Speaker 1: regular system of police to be reclaimed, whereas nothing can
1:42:28
Speaker 1: be more gentle than he in his primitive state, when
1:42:31
Speaker 1: placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity
1:42:34
Speaker 1: of brutes and the pernicious good sense of civilized man,
1:42:39
Speaker 1: and equally confined by instinct and reason to the care
1:42:42
Speaker 1: of providing against the mischief which threatens him, he is
1:42:45
Speaker 1: withheld by natural compassion from doing any injury to others,
1:42:49
Speaker 1: so far from being ever so little prone even to
1:42:53
Speaker 1: return that which he has received. For according to the
1:42:56
Speaker 1: axiom of the wise luck, where there is no property,
1:43:00
Speaker 1: there can be no injury. But we must take notice
1:43:04
Speaker 1: that the society now formed, and the relations now established
1:43:08
Speaker 1: among men, require in them qualities different from those which
1:43:12
Speaker 1: they derived from their primitive constitution. That as a sense
1:43:16
Speaker 1: of morality began to insinuate itself into human actions, and
1:43:20
Speaker 1: every man, before the enacting of laws, was the only
1:43:23
Speaker 1: judge and avenger of the injuries he had received. That
1:43:27
Speaker 1: goodness of heart, suitable to the pure state of nature,
1:43:31
Speaker 1: by no means suited infant society. That it was necessary
1:43:35
Speaker 1: punishments should become severer in the same proportion that the
1:43:38
Speaker 1: opportunities of offending became more frequent, and the dread of
1:43:42
Speaker 1: vengeance added strength to the weak curb of the law. Thus,
1:43:47
Speaker 1: though men were become less patient, and natural compassion had
1:43:51
Speaker 1: already suffered some alteration. This period of the development of
1:43:55
Speaker 1: the human faculties, holding a just mean between the indolence
1:43:59
Speaker 1: of the prinsmitive state and the petulant activity of self love,
1:44:03
Speaker 1: must have been the happiest and most durable epoch. The
1:44:07
Speaker 1: more we reflect on this state, the more convinced we
1:44:10
Speaker 1: shall be that it was the least subject of any revolutions,
1:44:14
Speaker 1: the best for man, and that nothing could have drawn
1:44:16
Speaker 1: him out of it but some fatal accident, which for
1:44:19
Speaker 1: the public good should never have happened. The example of
1:44:24
Speaker 1: the savages, most of whom have been found in this condition,
1:44:27
Speaker 1: seems to confirm that mankind was formed whatever to remain
1:44:31
Speaker 1: in it, that in this condition is the real youth
1:44:35
Speaker 1: of the world, and that all ulterior improvements have been
1:44:38
Speaker 1: so many steps in appearance towards the perfection of individuals,
1:44:42
Speaker 1: but in fact towards the decrepitness of the species. As
1:44:47
Speaker 1: long as men remained satisfied with their rustic cabins, as
1:44:51
Speaker 1: long as they confined themselves to the use of clothes
1:44:54
Speaker 1: made of the skins of other animals, and the use
1:44:57
Speaker 1: of thorns and fish bones in putting these skins together,
1:45:00
Speaker 1: As long as they continued to consider feathers and shells
1:45:03
Speaker 1: as sufficient ornaments, and to paint their bodies of different colors,
1:45:07
Speaker 1: to improve or ornament their bows and arrows, to form
1:45:11
Speaker 1: and scoop out with sharp edged stone, some little fishing boats,
1:45:15
Speaker 1: or clumsy instruments of music. In a word, as long
1:45:19
Speaker 1: as they undertook such works only as a single person
1:45:21
Speaker 1: could finish, and stuck to such arts as did not
1:45:24
Speaker 1: require the joint endeavors of several hands, they lived free, healthy, honest,
1:45:30
Speaker 1: and happy as much as their nature would admit, and
1:45:33
Speaker 1: continued to enjoy with each other all the pleasures of
1:45:36
Speaker 1: an independent intercourse. But from the moment one man began
1:45:40
Speaker 1: to stand in need of another's assistance, from the moment
1:45:43
Speaker 1: it appeared an advantage for one man to possess the
1:45:46
Speaker 1: quantity of provisions requisite for two, all equality vanished. Property
1:45:52
Speaker 1: started up, labor became necessary, and boundless. Forests became smiling fields,
1:45:58
Speaker 1: which it was found necessary to water with human sweat,
1:46:02
Speaker 1: and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to
1:46:05
Speaker 1: sprout out and grow with the fruits of the earth.
1:46:09
Speaker 1: Metallurgy and agriculture were the two arts whose invention produced
1:46:14
Speaker 1: this great revolution. With the poet it is gold and silver,
1:46:20
Speaker 1: but with the philosopher it is iron and corn, which
1:46:22
Speaker 1: have civilized men and ruined mankind. Accordingly, both one and
1:46:28
Speaker 1: the other were unknown to the savages of America, who
1:46:31
Speaker 1: for that very reason have always continued savages, nay, other
1:46:36
Speaker 1: nations seem to have continued in a state of barbarism
1:46:40
Speaker 1: as long as they continued to exercise one only of
1:46:43
Speaker 1: these arts, without the other. And perhaps one of the
1:46:46
Speaker 1: best reasons that can be assigned why Europe has been,
1:46:50
Speaker 1: if not earlier, at least more constantly and better civilized
1:46:53
Speaker 1: than the other quarters of the world is that she
1:46:56
Speaker 1: both abounds most in iron and is best qualified to
1:47:00
Speaker 1: produce corn. It is a very difficult matter to tell
1:47:04
Speaker 1: how men came to know anything of iron and the
1:47:07
Speaker 1: art of employing it, For we are not to suppose
1:47:10
Speaker 1: that they should of themselves think of digging it out
1:47:13
Speaker 1: of the mines and preparing it for fusion before they
1:47:17
Speaker 1: knew what could be the result of such a process.
1:47:19
Speaker 1: On the other hand, there is the less reason to
1:47:22
Speaker 1: attribute this discovery to any accidental fire, as mines are
1:47:25
Speaker 1: formed nowhere but in dry and barren places, and such
1:47:29
Speaker 1: as are bear of trees and plants, so that it
1:47:32
Speaker 1: looks as if nature had taken pains to keep from
1:47:35
Speaker 1: us so mischievous a secret. Nothing therefore remains, but the
1:47:39
Speaker 1: extraordinary circumstance of some volcano, which belching forth metallic substances
1:47:44
Speaker 1: ready fused, might have given the spectators a notion of
1:47:48
Speaker 1: imitating that operation of nature. And after all, we must
1:47:52
Speaker 1: suppose them endured with an extraordinary stock of courage and
1:47:55
Speaker 1: foresight to undertake so painful a work, and have at
1:47:58
Speaker 1: so great a distance an eye to the advantages they
1:48:01
Speaker 1: might derive from it, qualities scarcely suitable, but to heads
1:48:06
Speaker 1: more exercise than those of such discoveries can be supposed
1:48:09
Speaker 1: to have been. As to agriculture, the principles of it
1:48:13
Speaker 1: were known a long time before the practice of it
1:48:15
Speaker 1: took place, and it is hardly possible that men constantly
1:48:19
Speaker 1: employed in drawing their subsistence from trees and plants should
1:48:23
Speaker 1: not have early hit on the means employed by nature
1:48:26
Speaker 1: for the generation of vegetables. But in all probability it
1:48:29
Speaker 1: was very late before their industry took a turn that way, either,
1:48:33
Speaker 1: because trees, which with their land and water games supplied
1:48:37
Speaker 1: them with sufficient food did not require their attention, or
1:48:40
Speaker 1: because they did not know the use of corn, or
1:48:43
Speaker 1: because they had no instruments to cultivate it, or because
1:48:47
Speaker 1: they were destitute of foresight in regard to future necessities,
1:48:51
Speaker 1: or in fine, because they wanted means to hinder others
1:48:54
Speaker 1: from running away with the fruits of their labors. We
1:48:57
Speaker 1: may believe that on their becoming more in dustrials, they
1:49:00
Speaker 1: began their agriculture by cultivating with sharp stones and pointed sticks,
1:49:04
Speaker 1: a few pulse or roots about their cabins, and that
1:49:08
Speaker 1: it was a long time before they knew the methods
1:49:10
Speaker 1: of preparing corn and were provided with the instruments necessary
1:49:14
Speaker 1: to raise it in large quantities. Not to mention the
1:49:17
Speaker 1: necessity there is, in order to follow this occupation in
1:49:21
Speaker 1: sol lands, to consent to lose something at present to
1:49:24
Speaker 1: gain a great deal hereafter, a precaution very foreign to
1:49:28
Speaker 1: the turn of man's mind in a savage state, in which,
1:49:31
Speaker 1: as I have already taken notice, he can hardly foresee
1:49:35
Speaker 1: his wants from morning to night. For this reason, the
1:49:38
Speaker 1: invention of other arts must have been necessary to oblige
1:49:42
Speaker 1: mankind to apply to that of agriculture. As soon as
1:49:45
Speaker 1: men were wanted to fuse and forge iron, others were
1:49:48
Speaker 1: wanted to maintain them. The more hands were employed in manufactures,
1:49:53
Speaker 1: the fewer hands were left to provide subsistence for all,
1:49:57
Speaker 1: Though the number of mouths to be supplied with food
1:49:59
Speaker 1: continued the same, And as some required commodities in exchange
1:50:03
Speaker 1: for their iron, the rest at last found out the
1:50:06
Speaker 1: method of making iron subservient to the multiplication of commodities. Hence,
1:50:12
Speaker 1: on the one hand husbandry and agriculture, and on the
1:50:15
Speaker 1: other the art of working metals and of multiplying the
1:50:18
Speaker 1: uses of them to the tilling of the earth. The
1:50:21
Speaker 1: distribution of it necessarily succeeded, and to property once acknowledged
1:50:26
Speaker 1: the first rules of justice. For to secure every man
1:50:30
Speaker 1: his own, every man must have something. Moreover, as men
1:50:34
Speaker 1: began to extend their views to futurity, and all found
1:50:38
Speaker 1: themselves in possession of more or less goods capable of
1:50:41
Speaker 1: being lost, everyone in particular had reason to fear lest
1:50:45
Speaker 1: reprisals should be made on him for any injury he
1:50:48
Speaker 1: might do to others. The origin is so much the
1:50:52
Speaker 1: more natural, as it is impossible to conceive how property
1:50:56
Speaker 1: can flow from any other source mud industry. For what
1:50:59
Speaker 1: can a man add but his labor to things which
1:51:02
Speaker 1: he has not made, in order to acquire a property
1:51:05
Speaker 1: in them. Tis the labor of the hands alone, which,
1:51:09
Speaker 1: giving the husbandman a title to the produce of the
1:51:11
Speaker 1: land he has tilled, gives him a title to the
1:51:14
Speaker 1: land itself, at least till he has gathered in the
1:51:17
Speaker 1: fruits of it, and so on from year to year.
1:51:21
Speaker 1: And this enjoyment, forming a continued possession, is easily transformed
1:51:25
Speaker 1: into a property. The ancients, says Grotius, by giving to
1:51:30
Speaker 1: Ceres the epithet of legislatorics, and to a festival celebrated
1:51:34
Speaker 1: in her honor the name of Thesmophoria, insinuated that the
1:51:38
Speaker 1: distribution of lands produced a new kind of right, that is,
1:51:42
Speaker 1: the right of property, different from that which results from
1:51:45
Speaker 1: the law of nature. Things thus circumstanced might have remained
1:51:50
Speaker 1: equal if men's talents had been equal, and if, for instance,
1:51:53
Speaker 1: the use of iron and the consumption of commodities had
1:51:56
Speaker 1: always held an exact proportion to each other. But as
1:52:01
Speaker 1: this proportion had no support, it was soon broken. The
1:52:05
Speaker 1: man that had most strength performed the most labor the
1:52:08
Speaker 1: most dexterous turned his labor to best account, the most
1:52:12
Speaker 1: ingenious found out methods of lessening his labor. The husbandman
1:52:16
Speaker 1: required more iron or the smith more corn, and while
1:52:20
Speaker 1: both worked equally, one earned a great deal by his labor,
1:52:24
Speaker 1: while the other could scarce live by his. It is
1:52:27
Speaker 1: thus that natural inequality insensibly unfolds itself with that arising
1:52:32
Speaker 1: from a variety of combinations, and that the difference among men,
1:52:36
Speaker 1: developed by the difference of their circumstances, becomes more sensible,
1:52:40
Speaker 1: more permanent in its effects, and begins to influence in
1:52:43
Speaker 1: the same proportion the condition of private persons. Things once
1:52:48
Speaker 1: arrived at this period, it is an easy matter to
1:52:51
Speaker 1: imagine the rest. I shall not stop to describe the
1:52:55
Speaker 1: successive inventions of other arts, the progress of language, the
1:52:59
Speaker 1: trial and employments of talents, the inequality of fortunes, the
1:53:03
Speaker 1: use or abuse of riches, nor all the details which
1:53:07
Speaker 1: follow these, and which everyone may easily supply. I shall
1:53:11
Speaker 1: just give a glance at mankind placed in this new
1:53:14
Speaker 1: order of things. Behold, then, all our faculties developed, our
1:53:20
Speaker 1: memory and imagination at work, self, love interested, reason rendered active,
1:53:26
Speaker 1: and the mind almost arrived at the utmost bounds of
1:53:29
Speaker 1: that perfection, it is capable of behold all our natural
1:53:33
Speaker 1: qualities put in motion the rank and condition of every
1:53:37
Speaker 1: man established not only as to the quantum of property
1:53:41
Speaker 1: and the power of serving or hurting others, but likewise
1:53:45
Speaker 1: as to genius, beauty, strength, or address, merit or talents.
1:53:50
Speaker 1: And as these were the only equalities which could command respect,
1:53:54
Speaker 1: it was found necessary to have, or at least to
1:53:56
Speaker 1: affect them. It was requisite for men to be thought
1:53:59
Speaker 1: what they really were. Not to be and to appear
1:54:03
Speaker 1: became two very different things. And from this distinction sprang
1:54:08
Speaker 1: pomp and knavery, and all the vices which form their train.
1:54:12
Speaker 1: On the other hand, man, heretofore free and independent, was
1:54:17
Speaker 1: now in consequence of a multitude of nude wants, brought
1:54:20
Speaker 1: under subjection, as it were, to all nature, and especially
1:54:25
Speaker 1: to his fellows, whose slave, in some sense he became,
1:54:29
Speaker 1: even by becoming their master. If rich he stood in
1:54:33
Speaker 1: need of their services, if poor of their assistance, even
1:54:37
Speaker 1: mediocrity itself could not enable him to do without them.
1:54:41
Speaker 1: He must therefore have been continually at work to interest
1:54:44
Speaker 1: them in his happiness and make them, if not really
1:54:48
Speaker 1: at least apparently find their advantage in laboring for his.
1:54:52
Speaker 1: This rendered him sly and artful in his dealings with some,
1:54:56
Speaker 1: imperious and cruel in his kneelings with others, and laid
1:55:00
Speaker 1: him under the necessity of using ill all those whom
1:55:03
Speaker 1: he stood in need of, as often as he could
1:55:05
Speaker 1: not awe them into a compliance with his will, and
1:55:08
Speaker 1: did not find it his interest to purchase it at
1:55:11
Speaker 1: the expense of real services. In fine, an insatiable ambition,
1:55:16
Speaker 1: the rage of raising their relative fortunes, not so much
1:55:20
Speaker 1: through real necessity as to overtop others, inspire all men
1:55:25
Speaker 1: with a wicked inclination to injure each other, and with
1:55:28
Speaker 1: a secret jealousy, so much the more dangerous as to
1:55:32
Speaker 1: carry its point with the greater security, and often puts
1:55:35
Speaker 1: on the face of benevolence. In a word, sometimes nothing
1:55:40
Speaker 1: was to be seen but a contention of endeavors on
1:55:43
Speaker 1: the one hand, and an opposition of interests on the other,
1:55:47
Speaker 1: while a secret desire of thriving at the expense of
1:55:50
Speaker 1: others constantly prevailed. Such were the first effects of property
1:55:54
Speaker 1: and the inseparable attendance of infant inequality riches. Before the
1:56:00
Speaker 1: invention of signs to represent them. Could scarce consist in
1:56:04
Speaker 1: anything but lands and cattle, the only real goods which
1:56:08
Speaker 1: men can possess. But when estates increased so much in
1:56:12
Speaker 1: number and an extent to take in whole countries and
1:56:15
Speaker 1: touch each other, it became impossible for one man to
1:56:18
Speaker 1: aggrandize himself but at the expense of some other, and
1:56:23
Speaker 1: the supernumerary inhabitants who were too weak or too indolent
1:56:27
Speaker 1: to make such acquisitions, in their turn impoverished without losing anything.
1:56:32
Speaker 1: Because while everything about them changed, they alone remained the same.
1:56:36
Speaker 1: Were obliged to receive or force their subsistence from the
1:56:40
Speaker 1: hands of the rich, and hence began to flow according
1:56:44
Speaker 1: to the different characters of each domination and slavery or
1:56:48
Speaker 1: violence and rapine. The rich on their side, Scarce began
1:56:52
Speaker 1: to taste the pleasure of commanding when they preferred it
1:56:56
Speaker 1: to every other, and making use of their old slaves
1:56:59
Speaker 1: to acquire new ones. They no longer thought of anything
1:57:02
Speaker 1: but subduing and enslaving their neighbors, like those ravenous wolves, who,
1:57:07
Speaker 1: having once tasted human flesh, despise every other food and
1:57:11
Speaker 1: devour nothing but men for the future. It is thus
1:57:15
Speaker 1: that the most powerful or the most wretched, respectively, considering
1:57:20
Speaker 1: their powers and wretchedness as a kind of title to
1:57:22
Speaker 1: the substance of others, even equivalent to that of property.
1:57:26
Speaker 1: The equality, once broken, was followed by the most shocking disorders.
1:57:32
Speaker 1: It is thus that the usurpations of the rich, the
1:57:35
Speaker 1: pillagings of the poor, and the unbridled passions of all,
1:57:39
Speaker 1: by stifling the cries of natural compassion and the as
1:57:43
Speaker 1: yet feeble voice of justice, rendered man avaricious, wicked, and ambitious.
1:57:49
Speaker 1: There arose between the title of the strongest and that
1:57:52
Speaker 1: of the first occupier, a perpetual conflict which always ended
1:57:56
Speaker 1: in battery and bloodshed. Infant society became came a scene
1:58:00
Speaker 1: of the most horrible warfare. Mankind thus debased and harassed,
1:58:05
Speaker 1: and no longer able to retreat or renounce the unhappy
1:58:08
Speaker 1: acquisitions it had made, laboring in short, merely to its confusion.
1:58:13
Speaker 1: By the abuse of those faculties which in themselves do
1:58:16
Speaker 1: it so much honor, brought itself to the very brink
1:58:20
Speaker 1: of ruin and destruction. Atonatous novitate molli di vesque misser
1:58:26
Speaker 1: kay e fuguaet optat opis at Quomodo voverat owed it.
1:58:33
Speaker 1: But it is impossible that men should not sooner or
1:58:36
Speaker 1: later have made reflections on so wretched a situation, and
1:58:40
Speaker 1: upon the calamities with which they were overwhelmed. The rich
1:58:44
Speaker 1: in particular, must have soon perceived how much they suffered
1:58:48
Speaker 1: by a perpetual war, of which they alone supported all
1:58:51
Speaker 1: the expense, and in which though all risked life, they
1:58:55
Speaker 1: alone risked any substance. Besides whatever color they might pret
1:59:00
Speaker 1: tend to give their usurpations, they sufficiently saw that these
1:59:04
Speaker 1: usurpations were, in the main founded upon false and precarious titles,
1:59:09
Speaker 1: and that what they had acquired by mere force others
1:59:12
Speaker 1: could gain again by mere force, rest out of their hands,
1:59:15
Speaker 1: without leaving them the least room to complain of such
1:59:18
Speaker 1: a proceeding. Even those who owed all their riches to
1:59:22
Speaker 1: their own industry could scarce ground their acquisitions upon a
1:59:27
Speaker 1: better title. It availed them nothing to say. Twas I
1:59:30
Speaker 1: built this wall, I acquired this spot by my labor,
1:59:35
Speaker 1: who traced it out for you. Another might object, And
1:59:37
Speaker 1: what right have you to expect payment at our expense
1:59:40
Speaker 1: for doing that we did not oblige you to do?
1:59:43
Speaker 1: Don't you know that numbers of your brethren perish or
1:59:46
Speaker 1: suffer grievously for want of what you possess more than
1:59:49
Speaker 1: suffice as nature, and that you should have had the
1:59:52
Speaker 1: express and unanimous consent of mankind to appropriate to yourself
1:59:56
Speaker 1: of their common more than was requisite for your private subsistence.
2:00:00
Speaker 1: Destitute of solid reasons to justify and sufficient force to
2:00:04
Speaker 1: defend himself, crushing individuals with ease, but with equal ease,
2:00:09
Speaker 1: crushed by numbers one against all, and unable on account
2:00:13
Speaker 1: of mutual jealousies, to unite with his equals against banditi,
2:00:16
Speaker 1: united by the common hopes of pillage, the rich man,
2:00:19
Speaker 1: thus pressed by necessity, at last conceived the deepest project
2:00:24
Speaker 1: that ever entered the human mind. This was to employ
2:00:27
Speaker 1: in his favor the very forces that attacked him, to
2:00:30
Speaker 1: make allies of his enemies, to inspire them with other maxims,
2:00:34
Speaker 1: and make them adopt other institutions as favorable to his pretensions,
2:00:38
Speaker 1: as the law of nature was unfavorable to them. With
2:00:43
Speaker 1: this view, after laying before his neighbors all the horrors
2:00:48
Speaker 1: of a situation which armed them all one against another,
2:00:51
Speaker 1: which rendered their possessions as burdensome as their wants, were intolerable,
2:00:56
Speaker 1: and in which no one would expect any safety, either
2:00:59
Speaker 1: in poverty or riches. He easily invented speciest arguments to
2:01:03
Speaker 1: bring them over to his purpose. Let us unite, said he,
2:01:07
Speaker 1: to secure the weak from oppression, restrain the ambitions, and
2:01:12
Speaker 1: secure to every man the possession of what belongs to him.
2:01:16
Speaker 1: Let us form rules of justice and peace, to which
2:01:19
Speaker 1: all may be obliged to conform, which shall not accept persons,
2:01:23
Speaker 1: but may in some sort make amends for the caprice
2:01:26
Speaker 1: of fortune by submitting alike the powerful and the weak
2:01:29
Speaker 1: to the observance of mutual duties. In a word, instead
2:01:33
Speaker 1: of turning our forces against ourselves, let us collect them
2:01:37
Speaker 1: into a sovereign power, which may govern us by wise laws.
2:01:41
Speaker 1: They protect and defend all the members of the association,
2:01:44
Speaker 1: repel common enemies, and maintain perpetual concord and harmony among us.
2:01:51
Speaker 1: Much fewer words of this kind were sufficient to draw
2:01:54
Speaker 1: in a parcel of rustics, whom it was an easy
2:01:56
Speaker 1: matter to impose upon, who had, besides too many quarrels
2:02:00
Speaker 1: among themselves, to live without arbiters and too much avarice,
2:02:04
Speaker 1: an ambition to live long without masters. All offered their
2:02:08
Speaker 1: next to the yoke in hopes of securing their liberty.
2:02:12
Speaker 1: For though they had sense enough to perceive the advantages
2:02:15
Speaker 1: of a political constitution, they had not experience enough to
2:02:18
Speaker 1: see beforehand the dangers of it. Those among them who
2:02:22
Speaker 1: were best qualified to foresee abuses were precisely those who
2:02:26
Speaker 1: expected to benefit by them. Even the soberist judge that
2:02:30
Speaker 1: requisite to sacrifice one part of their liberty to ensure
2:02:33
Speaker 1: the other. As a man dangerously wounded in any of
2:02:36
Speaker 1: his limbs readily parts with it to save the rest
2:02:39
Speaker 1: of his body, Such was, or must have been, had
2:02:43
Speaker 1: man been left to himself. The origin of society and
2:02:46
Speaker 1: of the laws which increased the fetters of the weak
2:02:49
Speaker 1: and the strength of the rich, irretrievably destroyed natural liberty
2:02:54
Speaker 1: fixed forever. The laws of property and inequality change an
2:02:58
Speaker 1: artful usurpation into aner revocable title, and for the benefit
2:03:02
Speaker 1: of a few ambitious individuals, subjected the rest of mankind
2:03:05
Speaker 1: to perpetual labor, servitude and misery. We may easily conceive
2:03:10
Speaker 1: how the establishment of a single society rendered that of
2:03:13
Speaker 1: all the rest absolutely necessary, and how to make head
2:03:17
Speaker 1: against united forces it became necessary for the rest of
2:03:21
Speaker 1: mankind to unite in their turn. Society is, once formed
2:03:25
Speaker 1: in this manner, soon multiplied or spread to such degree
2:03:28
Speaker 1: as to cover the face of the earth, and not
2:03:31
Speaker 1: to leave a corner in the whole universe where a
2:03:33
Speaker 1: man could throw off the yoke and withdraw his head
2:03:36
Speaker 1: from under the often ill conducted sword which he saw
2:03:39
Speaker 1: permanently hanging over it. The civil law being thus become
2:03:44
Speaker 1: the common rule of citizens. The law of nature no
2:03:47
Speaker 1: longer obtained, but among the different societies, in which, under
2:03:51
Speaker 1: the name of the law of nations it was qualified
2:03:54
Speaker 1: by some tacit conventions to render commerce possible and supply
2:03:59
Speaker 1: the place of natural compassion, which, losing by degrees all
2:04:03
Speaker 1: that influence over societies which it originally had over individuals,
2:04:08
Speaker 1: no longer exists, but in some great souls, who consider
2:04:11
Speaker 1: themselves as citizens of the world, enforcing the imaginary barriers
2:04:16
Speaker 1: that separate people from people. After the example of the
2:04:19
Speaker 1: sovereign Being from whom we all derive our existence, make
2:04:23
Speaker 1: the whole human race the object of their benevolence. End
2:04:30
Speaker 1: of discourse, second part Section one, Section six of the
2:04:43
Speaker 1: Discourse on Inequality by Jean Jacques Rousseau. This is a
2:04:49
Speaker 1: LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.
2:04:55
Speaker 1: For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org.
2:05:01
Speaker 1: This is a reading by Eric Jonas a discourse upon
2:05:04
Speaker 1: the origin and the foundation of the inequality among mankind
2:05:08
Speaker 1: by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Discourse, second part Section two. Political bodies,
2:05:15
Speaker 1: thus remaining in a state of nature among themselves, soon
2:05:18
Speaker 1: experienced the inconveniences which had obliged individuals to quit it.
2:05:23
Speaker 1: And this state became much more fatal to these great
2:05:26
Speaker 1: bodies than it had been before to the individuals which
2:05:29
Speaker 1: now composed them. Hence those national wars, those battles, those murders,
2:05:34
Speaker 1: those reprisals which make nature shudder and shock reason, hence
2:05:39
Speaker 1: all those horrible prejudices which make it a virtue and
2:05:42
Speaker 1: an honour to shed human blood. The worthiest men learned
2:05:46
Speaker 1: to consider the cutting the throats of their fellows as
2:05:48
Speaker 1: a duty. At length, men began to butcher each other
2:05:52
Speaker 1: by thousands, without knowing for what. And more murders were
2:05:55
Speaker 1: committed in a single action, and more horrible disorders at
2:05:59
Speaker 1: the tape making of a single town, and had been
2:06:02
Speaker 1: committed in the state of nature during ages together upon
2:06:05
Speaker 1: the whole face of the earth. Such are the first
2:06:09
Speaker 1: effects we may conceive to have arisen from their division
2:06:12
Speaker 1: of mankind into different societies. Let us return to their institution.
2:06:18
Speaker 1: I know that several writers have assigned other origins of
2:06:21
Speaker 1: political society, as, for instance, the conquests of the powerful,
2:06:26
Speaker 1: or the union of the week. And it is no
2:06:29
Speaker 1: matter of which of these causes we adopt in regard
2:06:32
Speaker 1: to what I am going to establish, that, however, which
2:06:35
Speaker 1: I have just laid down, seems to me the most
2:06:38
Speaker 1: natural for the following reasons. First because in the first case,
2:06:43
Speaker 1: the right of conquest being in fact no right at all,
2:06:46
Speaker 1: it could not serve as a foundation for any other right.
2:06:50
Speaker 1: The conqueror and the conquered, ever remaining with respect to
2:06:53
Speaker 1: each other in a state of war, unless the conquered,
2:06:56
Speaker 1: restored to the full possession of their liberty, should freely
2:07:00
Speaker 1: choose their conqueror for their chief till then whatever capitulations
2:07:05
Speaker 1: might have been made between them, as these capitulations were
2:07:09
Speaker 1: founded upon violence, and of course a facto null and void,
2:07:13
Speaker 1: there could not have existed in this hypothesis either a
2:07:17
Speaker 1: true society or a political body, or any other law,
2:07:21
Speaker 1: but that of the strongest. Second, because these words strong
2:07:26
Speaker 1: and weak are ambiguous. In the second case, for during
2:07:29
Speaker 1: the interval between the establishment of the right of property
2:07:33
Speaker 1: or prior occupation and that of political government, the meaning
2:07:37
Speaker 1: of these terms is better expressed by the words poor
2:07:40
Speaker 1: and rich. As before the establishment of laws, men in
2:07:44
Speaker 1: reality had no other means of reducing their equals, but
2:07:48
Speaker 1: by invading the property of these equals, or by parting
2:07:51
Speaker 1: with some of their own property to them. Third, because
2:07:55
Speaker 1: the poor, having nothing but their liberty to lose, it
2:07:58
Speaker 1: would have been the height of men madness in them
2:08:00
Speaker 1: to give up willingly the only blessing they had left
2:08:03
Speaker 1: without obtaining some consideration for it. Whereas the rich, being sensible,
2:08:09
Speaker 1: if I may say so, in every part of their possessions,
2:08:12
Speaker 1: it was much easier to do than mischief, and therefore
2:08:16
Speaker 1: more incumbent upon them to guard against it. And because
2:08:19
Speaker 1: in fine, it is but reasonable to suppose that a
2:08:22
Speaker 1: thing has been invented by him to whom it could
2:08:26
Speaker 1: be of service, rather than by him to whom it
2:08:28
Speaker 1: must prove detrimental. Government in its infancy had no regular
2:08:34
Speaker 1: and permanent form for want of a sufficient fund of
2:08:38
Speaker 1: philosophy and experience. Men could see no further than the
2:08:42
Speaker 1: present inconveniences, and never thought of providing remedies for future ones.
2:08:47
Speaker 1: But in proportion as they arose. In spite of all
2:08:51
Speaker 1: the labours of the wisest legislators, the political state still
2:08:55
Speaker 1: continued imperfect, because it was in a manner the work
2:08:59
Speaker 1: of chance, and as the foundations of it were ill laid, time,
2:09:04
Speaker 1: though sufficient to discover its defects and suggest the remedies
2:09:08
Speaker 1: for them, could never mend its original vices. Men were
2:09:12
Speaker 1: continually repairing, whereas to erect a good edifice, they should
2:09:16
Speaker 1: have begun, as Lycurgus did at Sparta, by clearing the
2:09:20
Speaker 1: area and removing the old materials. Society at first consisted
2:09:25
Speaker 1: merely of some general conventions, which all the members bound
2:09:29
Speaker 1: themselves to observe, and for the performance of which the
2:09:33
Speaker 1: whole body became security to every individual. Experience was necessary
2:09:38
Speaker 1: to show the great weakness of such a constitution, and
2:09:42
Speaker 1: how easy it was for those who infringe it to
2:09:44
Speaker 1: escape the conviction or chastisement of faults of which the
2:09:48
Speaker 1: public alone was to be both the witness and the judge.
2:09:52
Speaker 1: The laws could not fail of being eluded in a
2:09:55
Speaker 1: thousand ways inconveniences and disorders, could not but multiply continueually
2:10:00
Speaker 1: till it was at last found necessary to think of
2:10:03
Speaker 1: committing to private persons the dangerous trust of public authority,
2:10:07
Speaker 1: and to magistrates the care of enforcing obedience to the people.
2:10:12
Speaker 1: For to say that chiefs were elected before confederacies were formed,
2:10:16
Speaker 1: and that the ministers of the laws existed before the
2:10:19
Speaker 1: laws themselves, is a supposition too ridiculous to deserve. I
2:10:23
Speaker 1: should seriously refute it. It would be equally unreasonable to
2:10:28
Speaker 1: imagine that men at first threw themselves into the arms
2:10:31
Speaker 1: of an absolute master without any conditions or consideration on
2:10:35
Speaker 1: his side, and that the first means contrived by jealous
2:10:39
Speaker 1: and unconquered men for their common safety was to run
2:10:43
Speaker 1: hand over head into slavery. In fact, why did they
2:10:47
Speaker 1: give themselves superiors if it was not to be defended
2:10:51
Speaker 1: by them against oppression and protected in their lives, liberties
2:10:55
Speaker 1: and properties, which are, in a manner the constitutional elements
2:10:59
Speaker 1: of their being now in the relations between man and man.
2:11:03
Speaker 1: The worst that can happen to one man being to
2:11:06
Speaker 1: see himself at the discretion of another would it not
2:11:09
Speaker 1: have been contrary to the dictates of good sense to
2:11:12
Speaker 1: begin by making over to a chief the only things
2:11:15
Speaker 1: for the preservation of which they stood in need of
2:11:17
Speaker 1: his assistance. What equivalent could he have offered them for
2:11:22
Speaker 1: so fine a privilege? And had he presumed to exact
2:11:25
Speaker 1: it on pretense of defending them, would he not have
2:11:28
Speaker 1: immediately received the answer in the apologue, what worst treatment
2:11:33
Speaker 1: can we expect from an enemy? It is, therefore past dispute,
2:11:37
Speaker 1: and indeed a fundamental maxim of political law, that people
2:11:41
Speaker 1: gave themselves chiefs to defend their liberty, and not to
2:11:44
Speaker 1: be enslaved by them. If we have a prince, said
2:11:48
Speaker 1: Pliny to Trojan, it is in order that he may
2:11:51
Speaker 1: keep us from having a master. Political writers argue in
2:11:55
Speaker 1: regard to the love of liberty with the same philosophy
2:11:59
Speaker 1: that philosophers due in regard to the state of nature
2:12:02
Speaker 1: by the things they see, they judge of things very
2:12:05
Speaker 1: different which they have never seen, and they attribute to
2:12:08
Speaker 1: men a natural inclination to slavery on account of the
2:12:11
Speaker 1: patients with which the slaves within their notice carry the yoke,
2:12:16
Speaker 1: not reflecting that it is with liberty as with innocence
2:12:19
Speaker 1: and virtue, the value of which is not known but
2:12:22
Speaker 1: by those who possess them, though the relish for them
2:12:25
Speaker 1: is lost with the things themselves. I know the charms
2:12:28
Speaker 1: of your country, said bros at Us to a satrap
2:12:31
Speaker 1: who is comparing the life of the Spartans with that
2:12:33
Speaker 1: of the persepolites. But you cannot know the pleasures of mind.
2:12:38
Speaker 1: As an unbroken courser erects his mane pause the ground
2:12:42
Speaker 1: and rages at the bare sight of the bit, while
2:12:45
Speaker 1: a trained horse patiently suffers both whip and spur. Just
2:12:49
Speaker 1: so the barbarian will never reach his neck to the
2:12:52
Speaker 1: yoke which civilized man carries without murmuring, but prefers the
2:12:55
Speaker 1: most stormy liberty to a calm subjection. It is not, therefore,
2:13:00
Speaker 1: by the servile disposition of enslaved nations, that we must
2:13:04
Speaker 1: judge of the natural dispositions of man for or against slavery,
2:13:09
Speaker 1: but by the prodigies done by every free people to
2:13:12
Speaker 1: secure themselves from oppression. I know that the first are
2:13:15
Speaker 1: constantly crying up that peace and tranquility they enjoy in
2:13:19
Speaker 1: their irons, and that miserrimam servitudin pachim appellant. But when
2:13:24
Speaker 1: I see the others sacrifice, pleasures, peace, riches, power, and
2:13:29
Speaker 1: even life itself to the preservation of that single jewel,
2:13:32
Speaker 1: so much slighted by those who have lost it. When
2:13:35
Speaker 1: I see freeborn animals, through a natural abhorrence to captivity,
2:13:39
Speaker 1: dash their brains out against the bars of their prison,
2:13:42
Speaker 1: When I see multitudes of naked savages despise European pleasures
2:13:47
Speaker 1: and brave hunger, fire and sword and death itself to
2:13:50
Speaker 1: preserve their independency, I feel it belongs not to slaves
2:13:54
Speaker 1: to argue concerning liberty as to paternal authority, from which
2:14:00
Speaker 1: which several have derived, absolute government, and every other mode
2:14:03
Speaker 1: of society. It is sufficient, without having recourse to Locke
2:14:07
Speaker 1: and Sydney, to observe that nothing in the world differs
2:14:10
Speaker 1: more from the cruel spirit of despotism that the gentleness
2:14:14
Speaker 1: of that authority, which looks more to the advantage of
2:14:17
Speaker 1: him who obeys than to the utility of him who commands.
2:14:21
Speaker 1: That by the law of nature, the father continues master
2:14:24
Speaker 1: of his child no longer than the child stands in
2:14:27
Speaker 1: need of his assistance, that after that term they become equal,
2:14:31
Speaker 1: and that then the son entirely independent of the father
2:14:35
Speaker 1: owes him no obedience, but only respect. Gratitude is indeed
2:14:40
Speaker 1: a duty which we are bound to pay, but which
2:14:43
Speaker 1: benefactors cannot exact. Instead of saying that civil society is
2:14:47
Speaker 1: derived from paternal authority, we should rather say it is
2:14:51
Speaker 1: to the former that the latter owes its principal force.
2:14:55
Speaker 1: No one individual was acknowledged as the father of several
2:14:58
Speaker 1: other individuals till they settled about him. The father's goods,
2:15:03
Speaker 1: which he can indeed dispose of as he pleases, are
2:15:07
Speaker 1: the ties which hold his children to their dependence upon him,
2:15:11
Speaker 1: And he may divide his substance among them in proportion
2:15:14
Speaker 1: as they shall have deserved his attention by a continual
2:15:17
Speaker 1: deference to his commands. Now, the subjects of a despotic chief,
2:15:22
Speaker 1: far from having any such favor to expect from him,
2:15:25
Speaker 1: as both themselves and all they have, or his property,
2:15:29
Speaker 1: or at least are considered by him as such, are
2:15:32
Speaker 1: obliged to receive as a favor what he relinquishes to
2:15:36
Speaker 1: them of their own property. He does them justice when
2:15:39
Speaker 1: he strips them, he treats them with mercy when he
2:15:42
Speaker 1: suffers them to live. By continuing in this manner, to
2:15:46
Speaker 1: compare facts with right, we should discover as little solidity
2:15:50
Speaker 1: as truth in the voluntary establishment of tyranny. And it
2:15:54
Speaker 1: would be a hard matter to prove the validity of
2:15:57
Speaker 1: a contract which was binding only on one side, in
2:16:01
Speaker 1: which one of the parties should stake everything and the
2:16:04
Speaker 1: other nothing, and which could turn out to the prejudice
2:16:07
Speaker 1: of him alone who had bound himself. This odious system is,
2:16:12
Speaker 1: even at this day, far from being that of wise
2:16:16
Speaker 1: and good monarchs, and especially of the kings of France,
2:16:20
Speaker 1: as may be seen by diverse passages in their edicts,
2:16:24
Speaker 1: and particularly by that of a celebrated piece published in
2:16:28
Speaker 1: sixteen sixty seven in the name and by the Orders
2:16:32
Speaker 1: of Louis the fourteenth quote. Let it therefore not be
2:16:36
Speaker 1: said that the sovereign is not subject to the laws
2:16:39
Speaker 1: of his realm, Since that he is is a maxim
2:16:42
Speaker 1: of the law of nations, which flattery has sometimes attacked,
2:16:46
Speaker 1: but which good princes have always defended as the tutelary
2:16:50
Speaker 1: divinity of their realms. How much more reasonable is it
2:16:54
Speaker 1: to say, with the sage Plato, that the perfect happiness
2:16:58
Speaker 1: of a state consists in the subject to obeying their prince,
2:17:01
Speaker 1: the prince obeying the laws and the laws being equitable
2:17:05
Speaker 1: and always directed to the good of the public, I
2:17:09
Speaker 1: shall not stop to consider if liberty, being the most
2:17:13
Speaker 1: noble faculty of man, it is not degrading to one's nature,
2:17:17
Speaker 1: reducing one's self to the level of brutes who are
2:17:20
Speaker 1: the slaves of instinct, and even offending the author of
2:17:24
Speaker 1: one's being, to renounce without reserve, the most precious of
2:17:27
Speaker 1: his gifts, and submit to the commission of all the
2:17:31
Speaker 1: crimes he has forbid us merely to gratify a mad
2:17:34
Speaker 1: or cruel master. And if this sublime artist ought to
2:17:38
Speaker 1: be more irritating at seeing his work destroyed than at
2:17:42
Speaker 1: seeing it dishonored, I shall only ask what right those
2:17:46
Speaker 1: who were not afraid thus to degrade themselves could have
2:17:50
Speaker 1: to subject their dependence to the same ignominy, and renounce,
2:17:54
Speaker 1: in the name of their posterity, blessings for which it
2:17:57
Speaker 1: is not indebted to their liberality, and without which life
2:18:01
Speaker 1: itself must appear a burden to all those who are
2:18:04
Speaker 1: worthy to live. Puffendorff says that as we can transfer
2:18:09
Speaker 1: our property from one to another by contracts and conventions,
2:18:12
Speaker 1: we may likewise divest ourselves of our liberty in favor
2:18:16
Speaker 1: of other men. This, in my opinion, is a very
2:18:19
Speaker 1: poor way of arguing, for in the first place, the
2:18:22
Speaker 1: property I see to another becomes by such session a
2:18:26
Speaker 1: thing quite foreign to me, and the abuse of which
2:18:29
Speaker 1: can no way affect me. But it concerns me greatly
2:18:32
Speaker 1: that my liberty is not abused, and I cannot, without
2:18:36
Speaker 1: incurring the guilt of the crimes I may be forced
2:18:39
Speaker 1: to commit, expose myself to become the instrument of any
2:18:43
Speaker 1: Besides the right of property, being of mere human convention
2:18:47
Speaker 1: and institution, every man may dispose as he pleases of
2:18:50
Speaker 1: what he possesses. But the case is otherwise with regard
2:18:54
Speaker 1: to the essential gifts of nature, such as life and liberty,
2:18:57
Speaker 1: which every man is permitted to enjoy, and of which
2:19:00
Speaker 1: it is doubtful at least whether any man has a
2:19:03
Speaker 1: right to divest himself. By giving up the one, we
2:19:07
Speaker 1: degrade our being. By giving up the other, we annihilate it,
2:19:10
Speaker 1: as much as it is our power to do so.
2:19:13
Speaker 1: And as no temporal enjoyments can indemnify us for the
2:19:16
Speaker 1: loss of either, it would be at once offending both
2:19:20
Speaker 1: nature and reason to renounce them for any consideration. But
2:19:24
Speaker 1: though we could transfer our liberty as we do our substance.
2:19:28
Speaker 1: The difference would be very great with regard to our children,
2:19:31
Speaker 1: who enjoy our substance but by a session of our right.
2:19:35
Speaker 1: Whereas liberty being a blessing which as men they hold
2:19:38
Speaker 1: from nature, their parents have no right to strip them
2:19:42
Speaker 1: of it. So that as to establish slavery, it was
2:19:45
Speaker 1: necessary to do violence to nature. So it was necessary
2:19:49
Speaker 1: to alter nature to perpetuate such a right. And the
2:19:52
Speaker 1: juris consults who have gravely pronounced that the child of
2:19:55
Speaker 1: a slave comes a slave into the world, have in
2:19:59
Speaker 1: other words, to say, decided that a man does not
2:20:02
Speaker 1: come a man into the world. It therefore appears to
2:20:06
Speaker 1: me incontestedly true that not only governments did not begin
2:20:10
Speaker 1: by arbitrary power, which is but the corruption and extreme
2:20:14
Speaker 1: term of government, and at length brings it back to
2:20:18
Speaker 1: the law of the strongest, against which governments were at
2:20:21
Speaker 1: first the remedy. But even that, allowing they had commenced
2:20:25
Speaker 1: in this manner, such power, being illegal in itself, could
2:20:28
Speaker 1: never have served as a foundation to the rights of society,
2:20:32
Speaker 1: nor of course, to the inequality of institution. I shall
2:20:36
Speaker 1: not now enter upon the inquiries which still remain to
2:20:39
Speaker 1: be made into the nature of the fundamental pacts of
2:20:42
Speaker 1: every kind of government. But, following the common opinion, confine
2:20:48
Speaker 1: myself in this place to the establishment of the political
2:20:51
Speaker 1: body as a real contract between the multitude and the
2:20:55
Speaker 1: chiefs elected by it, a contract by which both parties
2:20:59
Speaker 1: obliged themselves to the observance of the laws that are
2:21:02
Speaker 1: therein stipulated and form the bands of their union. The multitude,
2:21:07
Speaker 1: having on occasion of the social relations between them, concentered
2:21:11
Speaker 1: all their wills in one person. All the articles in
2:21:15
Speaker 1: regard to which this will explains itself becomes so many
2:21:19
Speaker 1: fundamental laws which oblige without exception all the members of
2:21:23
Speaker 1: the state, and one of which laws regulates the choice
2:21:27
Speaker 1: and the power of the magistrates appointed to look to
2:21:29
Speaker 1: the execution of the rest. This power extends to everything
2:21:34
Speaker 1: that can maintain the constitution, but extends to nothing that
2:21:38
Speaker 1: can alter it. To this power are added honors that
2:21:42
Speaker 1: may render the laws and the ministers of them respectable.
2:21:45
Speaker 1: And the persons of the ministers are distinguished by certain
2:21:49
Speaker 1: prerogatives which may take them amends for the great fatigues,
2:21:54
Speaker 1: and inseparable from a good administration. The magistrate on his
2:21:59
Speaker 1: side a bliged himself not to use the power with
2:22:03
Speaker 1: which he is entrusted, but conformably to the intention of
2:22:07
Speaker 1: his constituents, to maintain every one of them in the
2:22:10
Speaker 1: peaceable possession of his property, and upon all occasions prefer
2:22:15
Speaker 1: the good of the public to his own private interest.
2:22:19
Speaker 1: Before experience had demonstrated, or a thorough knowledge of the
2:22:22
Speaker 1: human heart had pointed out the abuses inseparable from such
2:22:26
Speaker 1: a constitution, it must have appeared so much the more perfect,
2:22:30
Speaker 1: as those appointed to look to its preservation were themselves
2:22:34
Speaker 1: most concerned therein. For magistracy and its rights being built
2:22:39
Speaker 1: solely on the fundamental laws, so soon as these ceased
2:22:43
Speaker 1: to exist, the magistrates would cease to be lawful, the
2:22:47
Speaker 1: people would no longer be bound to obey them, And
2:22:50
Speaker 1: as the essence of the state did not consist in
2:22:53
Speaker 1: the magistrates, but in the laws, the members of it
2:22:56
Speaker 1: would immediately become entitled to their primitive and natural liberty.
2:23:01
Speaker 1: A little reflection would afford us new arguments in confirmation
2:23:05
Speaker 1: of this truth, and the nature of the contract might
2:23:08
Speaker 1: alone convince us that it cannot be irrevocable. For if
2:23:12
Speaker 1: there was no superior power capable of guaranteeing the fidelity
2:23:16
Speaker 1: of the contracting parties, and of obliging them to fulfill
2:23:20
Speaker 1: their mutual engagements. They would remain sole judges in their
2:23:24
Speaker 1: own case, and each of them would always have a
2:23:26
Speaker 1: right to renounce the contract as soon as he discovered
2:23:30
Speaker 1: that the other had broke the conditions of it, or
2:23:33
Speaker 1: that these conditions ceased to suit his private convenience. Upon
2:23:37
Speaker 1: this principle, the right of abdication may probably be founded.
2:23:42
Speaker 1: Now To consider, as we do nothing, but what is
2:23:44
Speaker 1: human in this institution? If the magistrate, who has all
2:23:48
Speaker 1: the power in his own hands, and who appropriates to
2:23:51
Speaker 1: himself all the advantages of the contract, has notwithstanding a
2:23:55
Speaker 1: right to divest himself of his authority, how much a
2:23:59
Speaker 1: better right must the people, who pay for all the
2:24:01
Speaker 1: faults of its chief have to renounce their dependence upon him.
2:24:06
Speaker 1: But the shocking dissensions and disorders without number which would
2:24:10
Speaker 1: be the necessary consequence of so dangerous a privilege, show
2:24:14
Speaker 1: more than anything else, how much a human government stood
2:24:17
Speaker 1: in need of a more solid basis than that of
2:24:20
Speaker 1: mere reason, and how necessary it was for the public
2:24:23
Speaker 1: tranquility that the will of the Almighty should interpose to
2:24:27
Speaker 1: give to sovereign authority, a sacred and inviolable character, which
2:24:33
Speaker 1: should deprive subjects of the mischievous right to dispose of
2:24:36
Speaker 1: it whom they pleased. If mankind had received no other
2:24:40
Speaker 1: advantages from religion, this alone would be sufficient to make
2:24:43
Speaker 1: them adopt and cherish it, since it is the means
2:24:47
Speaker 1: of saving more blood than fanaticism has been the cause
2:24:50
Speaker 1: of the spilling. But to resume the thread of our hypothesis,
2:24:55
Speaker 1: the various forms of government owe their origin to the
2:24:58
Speaker 1: various degrees of inequality between the members at the time
2:25:01
Speaker 1: they first coalesced into a political body. Where a man
2:25:05
Speaker 1: happened to be eminent for power, for virtue, for riches,
2:25:09
Speaker 1: or for credit, he became sole magistrate, and the state
2:25:13
Speaker 1: assumed a monarchical form. If many of pretty equal eminence
2:25:18
Speaker 1: out topped all the rest, they were jointly elected, and
2:25:21
Speaker 1: this election produced an aristocracy. Those between whose fortune or
2:25:26
Speaker 1: talents there happened to be no such disproportion, and who
2:25:29
Speaker 1: had deviated less from the state of nature, retained in
2:25:32
Speaker 1: common the supreme administration and formed a democracy. Time demonstrated
2:25:37
Speaker 1: which of these forms suited mankind best. Some remained altogether
2:25:42
Speaker 1: subject to the laws, others soon bowed their next to masters.
2:25:47
Speaker 1: The former labored to preserve their liberty. The latter thought
2:25:50
Speaker 1: of nothing but invading that of their neighbors, jealous at
2:25:54
Speaker 1: seeing others enjoy a blessing which themselves had lost. In
2:25:58
Speaker 1: a word, riches and conquest fell to the share of
2:26:02
Speaker 1: the one, and virtue and happiness to that of the other.
2:26:07
Speaker 1: In these various modes of government, the offices at first
2:26:10
Speaker 1: were all elective, and when riches did not preponderate, the
2:26:15
Speaker 1: preference was given to merit, which gives a natural ascendant,
2:26:18
Speaker 1: and to age, which is the parent of deliberateness in
2:26:22
Speaker 1: council and experience in execution. The ancients, among the Hebrews,
2:26:27
Speaker 1: the Geruns of Sparta, the Senate of Rome. Nay, the
2:26:31
Speaker 1: very etymology of our word signor shows how much gray
2:26:34
Speaker 1: hairs were formerly respected the oftener. The choice fell upon
2:26:39
Speaker 1: old men. The oftener it became necessary to repeat it,
2:26:43
Speaker 1: and the more the trouble of such repetitions became sensible.
2:26:46
Speaker 1: Electioneering took place, Factions arose, the parties contracted ill blood,
2:26:52
Speaker 1: civil wars blazed forth. The lives of the citizens were
2:26:56
Speaker 1: sacrificed to the pretended happiness of the state, and things
2:26:59
Speaker 1: at last came to such a pass as to be
2:27:02
Speaker 1: ready to relapse into their primitive confusion. The ambition of
2:27:06
Speaker 1: the principal men induced them to take advantage of these
2:27:09
Speaker 1: circumstances to perpetuate the hitherto temporary charges in their families.
2:27:15
Speaker 1: The people, already erred to dependence, accustomed to ease and
2:27:19
Speaker 1: the conveniences of life, and too much enervated to break
2:27:23
Speaker 1: their fetters, consented to the increase of their slavery for
2:27:26
Speaker 1: the sake of securing their tranquility. And it is thus
2:27:30
Speaker 1: that chiefs become hereditary. Contracted the habit of considering magistracies
2:27:34
Speaker 1: as a family estate, and themselves as proprietors of those
2:27:39
Speaker 1: communities of which at first they were but mere officers,
2:27:42
Speaker 1: to call their fellow citizens their slaves, to look upon
2:27:45
Speaker 1: them like so many cows or sheep, as a part
2:27:48
Speaker 1: of their substance, and to style themselves the peers of
2:27:51
Speaker 1: gods and kings of kings. By pursuing the progress of
2:27:56
Speaker 1: inequality in these different revolutions, we shall discover that these
2:28:00
Speaker 1: the establishment of laws and of the right of property
2:28:03
Speaker 1: was the first term of it. The institution of magistrates,
2:28:07
Speaker 1: the second, and the third and last the changing of
2:28:10
Speaker 1: legal and arbitrary power, so that the different states of
2:28:14
Speaker 1: rich and poor were authorized by the first epoch, those
2:28:18
Speaker 1: of powerful and weak, by the second, and by the
2:28:20
Speaker 1: third those of master and slave, which form the last
2:28:24
Speaker 1: degree of inequality, and the term in which all the
2:28:27
Speaker 1: rest at last end till new revolutions entirely dissolve the
2:28:31
Speaker 1: government or bring it back nearer to its legal constitution.
2:28:36
Speaker 1: To conceive the necessity of this progress, we are not
2:28:39
Speaker 1: so much to consider the motives for the establishment of
2:28:42
Speaker 1: political bodies as the forms these bodies assume in their administration,
2:28:47
Speaker 1: and the inconveniences with which they are essentially attended. For
2:28:52
Speaker 1: those vices which render social institutions necessary are the same
2:28:56
Speaker 1: which render the abuse of such institutions unavoidable. And, as
2:29:01
Speaker 1: Sparta alone accepted, whose laws chiefly regarded the education of children,
2:29:05
Speaker 1: and where Lycurgus established such manners and customs as in
2:29:09
Speaker 1: great measure made laws needless, the laws in general less
2:29:13
Speaker 1: strong than the passions restrain men without changing them, it
2:29:17
Speaker 1: would be no hard matter to prove that every government,
2:29:20
Speaker 1: which carefully guarding against all alteration and corruption, should scrupulously
2:29:25
Speaker 1: comply with the ends of its institution was unnecessarily instituted,
2:29:29
Speaker 1: And that a country where no one either eluded the
2:29:33
Speaker 1: laws or made an ill use of magistracy required neither
2:29:36
Speaker 1: laws nor magistrates. Political distinctions are necessarily attended with civil distinctions.
2:29:43
Speaker 1: The inequality between the people and the chiefs increase so
2:29:46
Speaker 1: fast as to be soon felt by the private members,
2:29:50
Speaker 1: and appears among them in a thousand shapes, according to
2:29:53
Speaker 1: their passions, their talents, and the circumstances of affairs. The
2:29:57
Speaker 1: magistrate cannot usurp any illegal power without making himself creatures
2:30:02
Speaker 1: with whom he must divide it. Besides, the citizens of
2:30:05
Speaker 1: a free state suffer themselves to be oppressed merely in proportion,
2:30:09
Speaker 1: as hurried on by a blind ambition, and looking rather
2:30:12
Speaker 1: below than above them, they come to love authority more
2:30:16
Speaker 1: than independence. When they submit to fetters, tis only to
2:30:19
Speaker 1: be the better able to fetter others in their turn.
2:30:23
Speaker 1: It is no easy matter to make them obey who
2:30:25
Speaker 1: did not wish to command, and the most refined policy
2:30:29
Speaker 1: would find it impossible to subdue those men who only
2:30:32
Speaker 1: desire to be independent. But inequality easily gains ground among
2:30:36
Speaker 1: base and ambitious souls. Ever, ready to run the risks
2:30:40
Speaker 1: of fortune, and almost indifferent whether they command or obey,
2:30:44
Speaker 1: as she proves either favorable or adverse to them. Thus,
2:30:48
Speaker 1: then there must have been a time when the eyes
2:30:50
Speaker 1: of the people were bewitched to such a degree that
2:30:53
Speaker 1: their rulers needed only to have said, to the most
2:30:55
Speaker 1: pitiful wretch, be great you and all your posterity, to
2:30:59
Speaker 1: make make him immediately appear great in the eyes of everyone,
2:31:03
Speaker 1: as well as in his own. And his descendants took
2:31:07
Speaker 1: still more upon them in proportion to their removes from him.
2:31:11
Speaker 1: The more distant and uncertain the cause, the greater the effect,
2:31:15
Speaker 1: The longer lines of drones of family produced, the more
2:31:19
Speaker 1: illustrious it was reckoned. Were this a proper place to
2:31:24
Speaker 1: enter into details, I could easily explain in what manner
2:31:27
Speaker 1: inequalities in point of credit and authority become unavoidable among
2:31:31
Speaker 1: private persons the moment that united into one body, they
2:31:36
Speaker 1: are obliged to compare themselves one with another, and to
2:31:39
Speaker 1: note the differences which they find in the continual use
2:31:43
Speaker 1: every man must make of his neighbor. These differences are
2:31:47
Speaker 1: of several kinds, but riches nobility or rank, power, and
2:31:51
Speaker 1: personal merit being, in general the principal distinctions by which
2:31:54
Speaker 1: men in society measure each other. I could prove that
2:31:57
Speaker 1: the harmony or conflict between these different forces is the
2:32:01
Speaker 1: surest indication of the good or bad original constitution of
2:32:04
Speaker 1: any state. I could make it appear that, as among
2:32:08
Speaker 1: these four kinds of inequality, personal qualities are the source
2:32:12
Speaker 1: of all the rest riches, is that in which they
2:32:15
Speaker 1: ultimately terminate, because being the most immediately useful to the
2:32:20
Speaker 1: prosperity of individuals and the most easy to communicate, they
2:32:25
Speaker 1: are made use of to purchase every other distinction. By
2:32:28
Speaker 1: this observation, we are enabled to judge with tolerable exactness
2:32:33
Speaker 1: how much any people has deviated from its primitive institution,
2:32:37
Speaker 1: and what steps it has still to make. The extreme
2:32:39
Speaker 1: term of corruption. I could show how much this universal
2:32:44
Speaker 1: desire of reputation, of honors, of preference with which we
2:32:48
Speaker 1: are all devoured, exercises and compares our talents and our forces,
2:32:52
Speaker 1: how much it excites and multiplies our passions, and by
2:32:56
Speaker 1: creating a universal competition, rivalship, or rather enmity among men,
2:33:01
Speaker 1: how many disappointments, successes, and catastrophes of every kind it
2:33:05
Speaker 1: daily causes among the innumerable pretenders whom it engages in
2:33:10
Speaker 1: the same career, I could show that it is to
2:33:13
Speaker 1: this itch of being spoken of, to this fury of
2:33:16
Speaker 1: distinguishing ourselves, which seldom never gives us a moment's respite,
2:33:20
Speaker 1: that we owe both the best and the worst things
2:33:23
Speaker 1: among us, our virtues and our vices, our sciences and
2:33:27
Speaker 1: our errors, our conquerors and our philosophers. That is to say,
2:33:32
Speaker 1: a great many bad things to the very few good ones.
2:33:36
Speaker 1: I could prove, in short, that if we behold a
2:33:38
Speaker 1: handful of rich and powerful men seated on the pinnacle
2:33:42
Speaker 1: of fortune and greatness, while the crowd grovel in obscurity
2:33:45
Speaker 1: and want it is merely because the first prize what
2:33:48
Speaker 1: they enjoy, but in the same degree that others want it,
2:33:52
Speaker 1: and that without changing their condition, they would cease to
2:33:56
Speaker 1: be happy the minute the people cease to be miserable.
2:33:59
Speaker 1: But these details would alone furnish sufficient matter for a
2:34:02
Speaker 1: more considerable work, in which might be weighed the advantages
2:34:07
Speaker 1: and disadvantages of every species of government relatively to the
2:34:11
Speaker 1: rights of man in a state of nature. It might
2:34:14
Speaker 1: likewise be unveiled all the different faces under which inequality
2:34:18
Speaker 1: has appeared to this day, and may hereafter appear to
2:34:22
Speaker 1: the end of time. According to the nature of these
2:34:24
Speaker 1: several governments, and the revolution's time must unavoidably occasion in them.
2:34:30
Speaker 1: We should then see the multitude oppressed by domestic tyrants,
2:34:34
Speaker 1: and consequence of those very precautions taken by them to
2:34:37
Speaker 1: guard against foreign masters. We should see oppression increase continually,
2:34:42
Speaker 1: without its being ever possible for the oppressed to know
2:34:44
Speaker 1: where it would stop, nor what lawful means they had
2:34:47
Speaker 1: left to check its progress. We should see the rights
2:34:51
Speaker 1: of citizens and the liberties of nations extinguished by slow degrees,
2:34:55
Speaker 1: and the groans and protestations and appeals of the week
2:34:58
Speaker 1: treated as seditious murmurings. We should see policy confined to
2:35:03
Speaker 1: a mercenary portion of the people the honor of defending
2:35:06
Speaker 1: the common cause. We should see imposts made necessary by
2:35:10
Speaker 1: such measures, the disheartened husbandmen desert his field even in
2:35:15
Speaker 1: time of peace, and quit the plow to take up
2:35:18
Speaker 1: the sword. We should see fatal and whimsical rules laid
2:35:23
Speaker 1: down considering the point of honor. We should see the
2:35:26
Speaker 1: champions of their country sooner or later become her enemies,
2:35:30
Speaker 1: and perpetually holding the ponyards to the breasts of their
2:35:33
Speaker 1: fellow citizens. Nay, the time would come when they might
2:35:37
Speaker 1: be heard to say to the oppressor of their country
2:35:40
Speaker 1: pectore see fratris gladium juguloque parentis condere me jubias gravidoeque
2:35:49
Speaker 1: in viscera partu conjugus in vita peragum tommin omnia dextra
2:35:57
Speaker 1: from the vast inequality of conditions and fortunes. From this
2:36:01
Speaker 1: great variety of passions and of talents, of useless arts,
2:36:05
Speaker 1: of pernicious arts, of frivolous sciences, would issue clouds of
2:36:09
Speaker 1: prejudices equally contrary to reason, to happiness, to virtue. We
2:36:14
Speaker 1: should see the chiefs ferment everything that tends to weaken
2:36:18
Speaker 1: men formed into societies by dividing them, Everything that, while
2:36:22
Speaker 1: it gives society an air of apparent harmony, sows in
2:36:26
Speaker 1: it the seeds of real division. Everything that can inspire
2:36:30
Speaker 1: the different orders with mutual distrust and hatred by an
2:36:33
Speaker 1: opposition of their rights and interests, and of course strengthen
2:36:37
Speaker 1: that power which contains them all. Tis from the bosom
2:36:40
Speaker 1: of this disorder and these revolutions, that despotism gradually rearing
2:36:45
Speaker 1: up her hideous crests and devouring in every part of
2:36:48
Speaker 1: the state. All that still remained sound and untainted, would
2:36:52
Speaker 1: at last issue to trample upon the laws and the people,
2:36:56
Speaker 1: and establish herself upon the ruins of the republic. The
2:37:00
Speaker 1: times immediately preceding this last alteration would be times of
2:37:04
Speaker 1: calamity and trouble, But at last everything would be swallowed
2:37:08
Speaker 1: up by the monster, and the people would no longer
2:37:11
Speaker 1: have chiefs or laws, but only tyrants. At this fatal period,
2:37:16
Speaker 1: all regard to virtue and manners would likewise disappear. For
2:37:20
Speaker 1: despotism Cui ex honesto nolla est space tolerates no other master.
2:37:27
Speaker 1: Wherever it rains the moment it speaks, Probity and duty
2:37:31
Speaker 1: lose all their influence, and the blindest obedience is the
2:37:35
Speaker 1: only virtue the miserable slaves have left them to practice.
2:37:39
Speaker 1: This is the last term of inequality. The extreme point
2:37:43
Speaker 1: which closes the circle and meets that which we set out.
2:37:46
Speaker 1: Tis here that all private men return to their primitive equality,
2:37:51
Speaker 1: because they are no longer of any account, and that
2:37:54
Speaker 1: the subjects having no longer any law but that of
2:37:57
Speaker 1: their masters, nor the master any law the law but
2:38:00
Speaker 1: his passions, all notions of good and principles of justice
2:38:05
Speaker 1: again disappear. Tis here that everything returns to the sole
2:38:09
Speaker 1: law of the strongest, and of course to a new
2:38:12
Speaker 1: state of nature, different from that with which we began.
2:38:15
Speaker 1: Inasmuch as the first was the state of nature and
2:38:17
Speaker 1: its purity, and the last the consequence of excessive corruption.
2:38:22
Speaker 1: There is, in other respects so little difference between these
2:38:26
Speaker 1: two states, and the contract of government is so much
2:38:29
Speaker 1: dissolved by despotism, that the despot is no longer master
2:38:33
Speaker 1: than he continues the strongest, and that as soon as
2:38:37
Speaker 1: his slaves can expel him, they may do it without
2:38:40
Speaker 1: his having the least right to complain of their using
2:38:42
Speaker 1: him ill. The insurrection which ends in the death or
2:38:46
Speaker 1: despotism of a sultan is as juridical an act as
2:38:49
Speaker 1: any by which, the day before he disposed of the
2:38:52
Speaker 1: lives and fortunes of his subjects, Force alone upheld him,
2:38:57
Speaker 1: force alone overturns him. Thus all things take place and
2:39:00
Speaker 1: succeed in their natural order. And whatever may be the
2:39:04
Speaker 1: upshot of these hasty and frequent revolutions, no one man
2:39:08
Speaker 1: has reason to complain of another's injustice, but only of
2:39:11
Speaker 1: his own. Indiscretion or bad fortune. By thus discovering and
2:39:16
Speaker 1: following the lost and forgotten tracts by which man from
2:39:20
Speaker 1: the natural must have arrived at the civil state. By
2:39:24
Speaker 1: restoring with the intermediate positions which I have been just
2:39:27
Speaker 1: indicating those which want of leisure obliges me to suppress,
2:39:31
Speaker 1: or which my imagination has not suggested, every attentive reader
2:39:35
Speaker 1: must unavoidably be struck that the immense space which separates
2:39:39
Speaker 1: these two states tis in this slow succession of things.
2:39:44
Speaker 1: He may meet with the solution of an infinite number
2:39:47
Speaker 1: of problems in morality and politics which philosophers are puzzled
2:39:51
Speaker 1: to solve. He will perceive that the mankind of one
2:39:54
Speaker 1: age not being the mankind of another. The reason why
2:39:58
Speaker 1: Diogenes could not f a man was that he sought
2:40:01
Speaker 1: among his contemporaries the man of an earlier period Cato.
2:40:06
Speaker 1: He will then see fell with Rome and with liberty,
2:40:10
Speaker 1: because he did not suit the age in which he lived,
2:40:13
Speaker 1: and the greatest of men served only to astonish that world,
2:40:17
Speaker 1: which would have cheerfully obeyed them had he come into
2:40:20
Speaker 1: a five hundred years earlier. In a word, he finds
2:40:24
Speaker 1: himself in a condition to understand how the soul and
2:40:27
Speaker 1: the passions of men, by insensible alterations, change, as it were,
2:40:31
Speaker 1: their nature. How it comes to pass that, at the
2:40:34
Speaker 1: long run, our wants and our pleasures change objects, that
2:40:38
Speaker 1: original man vanishing by degrees, Society no longer offers our inspection,
2:40:43
Speaker 1: but an assemblage of artificial men and factitious passions, which
2:40:47
Speaker 1: are the work of all these new relations, and have
2:40:50
Speaker 1: no foundation in nature. Reflection teaches us nothing on that head,
2:40:55
Speaker 1: but what experience perfectly confirms. Savage man and civilized man
2:41:00
Speaker 1: differs so much at bottom in point of inclinations and passions,
2:41:03
Speaker 1: that what constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would
2:41:06
Speaker 1: reduce the other to despair. The first size for nothing
2:41:10
Speaker 1: but repose and liberty. He desires only to live and
2:41:13
Speaker 1: to be exempt from labor. Nay, the adoraxy of the
2:41:18
Speaker 1: most confirmed stoic falls short of his consummate indifference for
2:41:21
Speaker 1: every other object. On the contrary, the citizen, always in motion,
2:41:26
Speaker 1: is perpetually sweating and toiling and racking his brains to
2:41:30
Speaker 1: find out occupation. Still more laborious, he continues a drudge
2:41:35
Speaker 1: to his last minute. Nay, he courts death to be
2:41:38
Speaker 1: able to live or renounce his life to acquire immortality.
2:41:43
Speaker 1: He cringes to men in power whom he hates, and
2:41:47
Speaker 1: to rich men, whom he despises. He sticks at nothing
2:41:51
Speaker 1: to have the honor of serving them. He is not
2:41:53
Speaker 1: ashamed to value himself on his own weakness and the
2:41:57
Speaker 1: protection they afford him, and proud of his he speaks
2:42:01
Speaker 1: with disdain of those who have not the honor of
2:42:04
Speaker 1: being the partner of his bondage. What a spectacle must
2:42:08
Speaker 1: the painful and envied labors of a European minister of
2:42:11
Speaker 1: state form in the eyes of a Caribbean How many
2:42:15
Speaker 1: cruel deaths would not this indolence savage prefer to such
2:42:18
Speaker 1: a horrid life, which very often is not even sweetened
2:42:22
Speaker 1: by the pleasure of doing good. But to see the
2:42:25
Speaker 1: drift of so many cares, his mind should first have
2:42:28
Speaker 1: affixed some meaning to these words power and reputation. He
2:42:32
Speaker 1: should be apprized that there are men who consider as
2:42:36
Speaker 1: something the looks of the rest of mankind, who know
2:42:39
Speaker 1: how to be happy and satisfied with themselves on the
2:42:42
Speaker 1: testimony of others sooner than upon their own. In fact,
2:42:46
Speaker 1: the real source of all those differences is that the
2:42:49
Speaker 1: savage lives within himself, whereas the citizen constantly beside himself
2:42:54
Speaker 1: knows only how to live in the opinion of others,
2:42:58
Speaker 1: insomuch that it is, if I may say, so, merely
2:43:01
Speaker 1: from their judgment, that he derives the consciousness of his
2:43:05
Speaker 1: own existence. It is foreign to my subject to show
2:43:09
Speaker 1: how this disposition engenders so much indifference for good and evil,
2:43:13
Speaker 1: notwithstanding so many and such fine discourses of morality, how everything,
2:43:19
Speaker 1: being reduced to appearances, becomes mere art and mummery, honor, friendship, virtue,
2:43:25
Speaker 1: and often vice itself, which we at last learn the
2:43:29
Speaker 1: secret to boast of. How, in short, ever inquiring of
2:43:33
Speaker 1: others what we are, and never daring to question ourselves
2:43:37
Speaker 1: on so delicate a point, in the midst of so
2:43:39
Speaker 1: much philosophy, humanity, and politeness, and so many sublime maxims,
2:43:45
Speaker 1: we have nothing to show for ourselves but a deceitful
2:43:48
Speaker 1: and frivolous exterior. Honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and
2:43:53
Speaker 1: pleasure without happiness. It is sufficient that I have proved
2:43:57
Speaker 1: that this is not the original condition of man, and
2:44:00
Speaker 1: that it is merely the spirit of society and the
2:44:03
Speaker 1: inequality which society engenders, that thus change and transform all
2:44:08
Speaker 1: our natural inclinations. I have endeavored to exhibit the origin
2:44:13
Speaker 1: and progress of inequality the institution and abuse of political societies,
2:44:18
Speaker 1: as far as these things are capable of being deduced
2:44:21
Speaker 1: from the nature of man by the mere light of reason,
2:44:24
Speaker 1: and independently of those sacred maxims which give to the
2:44:28
Speaker 1: sovereign authority the sanction of divine right. It follows from
2:44:32
Speaker 1: this picture that as there is scarce any inequality among
2:44:36
Speaker 1: men in a state of nature, all that which we
2:44:38
Speaker 1: now behold owes its force and its growth to the
2:44:41
Speaker 1: development of our faculties and the improvement of our understanding,
2:44:46
Speaker 1: and at last becomes permanent and lawful by the establishment
2:44:50
Speaker 1: of property and of laws. It likewise follows that moral inequality,
2:44:55
Speaker 1: authorized by any right that is merely positive, clashes with
2:44:59
Speaker 1: natural rights as often as it does not combine in
2:45:02
Speaker 1: the same proportion with physical inequality, a distinction which sufficiently
2:45:07
Speaker 1: determines what we are able to think in that respect
2:45:10
Speaker 1: of that kind of inequality which obtains in all civilized nations.
2:45:16
Speaker 1: Since it is evidently against the law of nature that
2:45:18
Speaker 1: infancies should command old age, folly, conduct, wisdom, and a
2:45:23
Speaker 1: handful of men should be ready to choke with superfluities,
2:45:27
Speaker 1: while the famished multitude want the commonest necessaries of life.
2:45:35
Speaker 1: End of a discourse upon the origin and the foundation
2:45:38
Speaker 1: of the inequality among mankind by Jean Jacques Rousseau