Here, perhaps, some disciple of Condillac and Helvetius will ask us whether, in this regard, we possess authentic dictionaries of the language of savage tribes found by voyagers in the isles of the ocean? No; but we have not made our philosophic religion out of the superstitions and prejudices of a certain school. We absolutely deny that it is necessary to study human nature in the famous savage of Aveyron, or in the like of him of the isles of the ocean, or the American continent. The savage state offers us humanity in swaddling-clothes, thus to speak, the germ of humanity, but not humanity entire. The true man is the perfect man of his kind; true human nature is human nature arrived at its development, as true society is also perfected society. We do not think it worth the while to ask a savage his opinion on the Apollo Belvidere, neither will we ask him for the principles that constitute the moral nature of man, because in him this moral nature is only sketched and not completed. Our great philosophy of the seventeenth century was sometimes a little too much pleased with hypotheses in which God plays the principal part, and crushes human liberty.[187] The philosophy of the eighteenth century threw itself into the opposite extreme; it had recourse to hypotheses of a totally different character, among others, to a pretended natural state, whence it undertook, with infinite pains, to draw society and man as we now see them. Rousseau plunged into the forests, in order to find there the model of liberty and equality. That is the commencement of his politics. But wait a little, and soon you will see the apostle of the natural state, driven, by a necessary inconsequence, from one excess to an opposite excess, instead of the sweets of savage liberty, proposing to us the _Contrat Social and Lacedemone_. Condillac[188] studies the human mind in a statue whose senses enter into exercise under the magic wand of a systematic analysis, and are developed in the measure and progress that are convenient to him. The statue successively acquires our five senses, but there is one thing that it does not acquire, that is, a mind like the human mind, and a soul like ours. And this was what was then called the experimental method! Let us leave there all those hypotheses. In order to understand reality, let us study it, and not imagine it. Let us take humanity as it is incontestably shown to us in its actual characters, and not as it may have been in a primitive, purely hypothetical state, in those unformed lineaments or that degradation which is called the savage state. In that, without doubt, may be found signs or _souvenirs_ of humanity, and, if this were the plea, we might, in our turn, examine the recitals of voyages, and find, even in that darkness of infancy or decrepitude, admirable flashes of light, noble instincts, which already appear, or still subsist, presaging or recalling humanity. But, for the sake of exactness of method and true