But while Nature has established an exact proportion between the wants of animals and their faculties, if she has treated man with greater bounty and munificence, if, in order to force him to be ‹sociable›, she has decreed that in a state of isolation his wants should surpass his faculties, whilst, on the contrary, in the social state, his powers, superior to his wants, open to him an unlimited field for nobler enjoyments, we ought to acknowledge that, as in his relation with the Creator man is elevated above the beasts by the religious sentiment, in his relations with his fellow-creatures by his sense of justice, in his relations with himself by the moral principle—in like manner, in relation to the means of living and multiplying, he is distinguished by a remarkable phenomenon, namely, «Exchange». Shall I essay to paint the state of poverty, of destitution, and of ignorance, in which, but for the power of exchanging, the human species would have been sunk, had it not, indeed, as is more likely, disappeared altogether. One of the most popular philosophers, in a romance which has been the charm of the young from generation to generation, has shown us man surmounting by his energy, his activity, his intelligence, the difficulties of absolute solitude. For the purpose of setting clearly before us what are the resources of that noble creature, the author has exhibited him as accidentally cut off from civilisation. It was part of Defoe’s plan to throw Robinson Crusoe into the Island of Juan Fernandez alone, naked, deprived of all that the union of efforts, the division of employments, exchange, society, add to the human powers. And yet, although the fancied obstacles are but imaginary, Defoe would have taken away from his tale even the shadow of probability if, too faithful to the thought which he wished to develop, he had not made forced concessions to the social state, by admitting that his hero had saved from shipwreck some indispensable things, such as provisions, gunpowder, a gun, a hatchet, a knife, cords, planks, iron, etc.; a decisive proof that society is the necessary medium in which man lives, and out of which not even a romance writer could figure him as existing. And, observe, that Robinson Crusoe carried with him into solitude another ‹social› treasure, a thousand times more precious than all these, and which the waves could not engulf, I mean his ideas, his recollections, his experience, above all, his language, [p102] without which he would not have been able to hold converse with himself, that is to say, to think.