Notwithstanding the disappearance of the more extravagant elements of the old thesis, the new speculation was far from being purged of the fundamental errors that had given such popularity to its predecessors. "If the sea," he says in one place, "bathes nothing but inaccessible rocks on your coasts, remain barbarous ichthyophagi; you will live all the more tranquilly for it, better perhaps, and assuredly more happily."[179] Apart from an outburst like this, the central idea remained the same, though it was approached from another side and with different objects. The picture of a state of nature had lost none of its perilous attraction, though it was hung in a slightly changed light. It remained the starting-point of the right and normal constitution of civil society, just as it had been the starting-point of the denunciation of civil society as incapable of right constitution, and as necessarily and for ever abnormal. Equally with the Discourses, the Social Contract is a repudiation of that historic method which traces the present along a line of ascertained circumstances, and seeks an improved future in an unbroken continuation of that line. The opening words, which sent such a thrill through the generation to which they were uttered in two continents, "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains," tell us at the outset that we are as far away as ever from the patient method of positive observation, and as deeply buried as ever in deducing practical maxims from a set of conditions which never had any other than an abstract and phantasmatic existence. How is a man born free? If he is born into isolation, he perishes instantly. If he is born into a family, he is at the moment of his birth committed to a state of social relation, in however rudimentary a form; and the more or less of freedom which this state may ultimately permit to him, depends upon circumstances. Man was hardly born free among Romans and Athenians, when both law and public opinion left a father at perfect liberty to expose his new-born infant. And the more primitive the circumstances, the later the period at which he gains freedom. A child was not born free in the early days of the Roman state, when the _patria potestas_ was a vigorous reality. Nor, to go yet further back, was he born free in the times of the Hebrew patriarchs, when Abraham had full right of sacrificing his son, and Jephthah of sacrificing his daughter.