A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind | Page 3

in the book of nature which never lies.
All that I shall repeat after her, must be true, without any intermixture of falsehood, but
where I may happen, without intending it, to introduce my own conceits. The times I am
going to speak of are very remote. How much you are changed from what you once were!
'Tis in a manner the life of your species that I am going to write, from the qualities which
you have received, and which your education and your habits could deprave, but could
not destroy. There is, I am sensible, an age at which every individual of you would
choose to stop; and you will look out for the age at which, had you your wish, your
species had stopped. Uneasy at your present condition for reasons which threaten your
unhappy posterity with still greater uneasiness, you will perhaps wish it were in your
power to go back; and this sentiment ought to be considered, as the panegyric of your
first parents, the condemnation of your contemporaries, and a source of terror to all those
who may have the misfortune of succeeding you.

DISCOURSE FIRST PART
However important it may be, in order to form a proper judgment of the natural state of
man, to consider him from his origin, and to examine him, as it were, in the first embryo
of the species; I shall not attempt to trace his organization through its successive
approaches to perfection: I shall not stop to examine in the animal system what he might
have been in the beginning, to become at last what he actually is; I shall not inquire
whether, as Aristotle thinks, his neglected nails were no better at first than crooked talons;
whether his whole body was not, bear-like, thick covered with rough hair; and whether,
walking upon all-fours, his eyes, directed to the earth, and confined to a horizon of a few
paces extent, did not at once point out the nature and limits of his ideas. I could only form
vague, and almost imaginary, conjectures on this subject. Comparative anatomy has not
as yet been sufficiently improved; neither have the observations of natural philosophy
been sufficiently ascertained, to establish upon such foundations the basis of a solid
system. For this reason, without having recourse to the supernatural informations with
which we have been favoured on this head, or paying any attention to the changes, that
must have happened in the conformation of the interior and exterior parts of man's body,
in proportion as he applied his members to new purposes, and took to new aliments, I
shall suppose his conformation to have always been, what we now behold it; that he
always walked on two feet, made the same use of his hands that we do of ours, extended
his looks over the whole face of nature, and measured with his eyes the vast extent of the
heavens.
If I strip this being, thus constituted, of all the supernatural gifts which he may have
received, and of all the artificial faculties, which we could not have acquired but by slow
degrees; if I consider him, in a word, such as he must have issued from the hands of
nature; I see an animal less strong than some, and less active than others, but, upon the
whole, the most advantageously organized of any; I see him satisfying the calls of hunger
under the first oak, and those of thirst at the first rivulet; I see him laying himself down to
sleep at the foot of the same tree that afforded him his meal; and behold, this done, all his

wants are completely supplied.
The earth left to its own natural fertility and covered with immense woods, that no
hatchet ever disfigured, offers at every step food and shelter to every species of animals.
Men, dispersed among them, observe and imitate their industry, and thus rise to the
instinct of beasts; with this advantage, that, whereas every species of beasts is confined to
one peculiar instinct, man, who perhaps has not any that particularly belongs to him,
appropriates to himself those of all other animals, and lives equally upon most of the
different aliments, which they only divide among themselves; a circumstance which
qualifies him to find his subsistence, with more ease than any of them.
Men, accustomed from their infancy to the inclemency of the weather, and to the rigour
of the different seasons; inured to fatigue, and obliged to defend, naked and without arms,
their life and their prey against the other wild inhabitants of the forest, or at least to avoid
their fury by flight, acquire a robust and almost unalterable habit of body; the children,
bringing with them into the world the excellent constitution of their parents, and