Finally, the passion of love, which produces such disasters in a state
of society, where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands
lead each day to duels and murders, where the duty of eternal fidelity
only serves to occasion adulteries, and where the law of continence
necessarily extends the debauching of women and the practice of
procuring abortion[184]--this passion in a state of nature, where it is
purely physical, momentary, and without any association of durable
sentiment with the object of it, simply leads to the necessary
reproduction of the species and nothing more.
"Let us conclude, then, that wandering in the forests, without industry,
without speech, without habitation, without war, without connection of
any kind, without any need of his fellows or without any desire to harm
them, perhaps even without ever recognising one of them individually,
savage man, subject to few passions and sufficing to himself, had only
the sentiments and the enlightenment proper to his condition. He was
only sensible of his real wants, and only looked because he thought he
had an interest in seeing; and his intelligence made no more progress
than his vanity. If by chance he hit on some discovery, he was all the
less able to communicate it; as he did not know even his own children.
An art perished with its inventor. There was neither education nor
progress; generations multiplied uselessly; and as each generation
always started from the same point, centuries glided away in all the
rudeness of the first ages, the race was already old, the individual
remained always a child."
This brings us to the point of the matter. For if you compare the
prodigious diversities in education and manner of life which reign in
the different orders of the civil condition, with the simplicity and
uniformity of the savage and animal life, where all find nourishment in
the same articles of food, live in the same way, and do exactly the same
things, you will easily understand to what degree the difference between
man and man must be less in the state of nature than in that of
society.[185] Physical inequality is hardly perceived in the state of
nature, and its indirect influences there are almost non-existent.
Now as all the social virtues and other faculties possessed by man
potentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to develop into
actuality, he might have remained to all eternity in his admirable and
most fitting primitive condition, but for the fortuitous concurrence of
a variety of external changes. What are these different changes, which
may perhaps have perfected human reason, while they certainly have
deteriorated the race, and made men bad in making them sociable?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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