Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)

by John Morley

With reference to virtues and vices in a state of nature, Hobbes is wrong in declaring that man in this state is vicious, as not knowing virtue. He is not vicious, for the reason that he does not know what being good is. It is not development of enlightenment nor the restrictions of law, but the calm of the passions and ignorance of vice, which keep them from doing ill. Tanto plus in illis profitcit vitiorum ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis.

Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which precedes in him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares with some of the brutes. Mandeville, who was forced to admit the existence of this admirable quality in man, was absurd in not perceiving that from it flow all the social virtues which he would fain deny. Pity is more energetic in the primitive condition than it is among ourselves. It is reflection which isolates one. It is philosophy which teaches the philosopher to say secretly at sight of a suffering wretch, Perish if it please thee; I am safe and sound. They may be butchering a fellow-creature under your window; all you have to do is to clap your hands to your ears, and argue a little with yourself to hinder nature in revolt from making you feel as if you were in the case of the victim.[182] The savage man has not got this odious gift. In the state of nature it is pity that takes the place of laws, manners, and virtue. It is in this natural sentiment rather than in subtle arguments that we have to seek the reluctance that every man would feel to do ill, even without the precepts of education.[183]

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?

What, then, are the intermediary facts between the state of nature and the state of civil society, the nursery of inequality? What broke up the happy uniformity of the first times? First, difference in soil, in climate, in seasons, led to corresponding differences in men's manner of living. Along the banks of rivers and on the shores of the sea, they invented hooks and lines, and were eaters of fish. In the forests they invented bows and arrows, and became hunters. In cold countries they covered themselves with the skins of beasts. Lightning, volcanoes, or some happy chance acquainted them with fire, a new protection against the rigours of winter. In company with these natural acquisitions, grew up a sort of reflection or mechanical prudence, which showed them the kind of precautions most necessary to their security. From this rudimentary and wholly egoistic reflection there came a sense of the existence of a similar nature and similar interests in their fellow-creatures. Instructed by experience that the love of well-being and comfort is the only motive of human actions, the savage united with his neighbours when union was for their joint convenience, and did his best to blind and outwit his neighbours when their interests were adverse to his own, and he felt himself the weaker. Hence the origin of certain rude ideas of mutual obligation.[186]

Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to withdraw into caves, they found axes of hard stone, which served them to cut wood, to dig the ground, and to construct hovels of branches and clay. This was the epoch of a first revolution, which formed the establishment and division of families, and which introduced a rough and partial sort of property. Along with rudimentary ideas of property, though not connected with them, came the rudimentary forms of inequality. When men were thrown more together, then he who sang or danced the best, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent, acquired the most consideration—that is, men ceased to take uniform and equal place. And with the coming of this end of equality there passed away the happy primitive immunity from jealousy, envy, malice, hate.

On the whole, though men had lost some of their original endurance, and their natural pity had already undergone a certain deterioration, this period of the development of the human faculties, occupying a just medium between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity of our modern self-love, must have been at once the happiest and the most durable epoch. The more we reflect, the more evident we find it that this state was the least subject to revolutions and the best for man. "So long as men were content with their rustic hovels, so long as they confined themselves to stitching their garments of skin with spines or fish bones, to decking their bodies with feathers and shells and painting them in different colours, to perfecting and beautifying their bows and arrows—in a word, so long as they only applied themselves to works that one person could do, and to arts that needed no more than a single hand, then they lived free, healthy, good, and happy, so far as was compatible with their natural constitution, and continued to enjoy among themselves the sweetness of independent intercourse. But from the moment that one man had need of the help of another, as soon as they perceived it to be useful for one person to have provisions for two, then equality disappeared, property was introduced, labour became necessary, and the vast forests changed into smiling fields, which had to be watered by the sweat of men, and in which they ever saw bondage and misery springing up and growing ripe with the harvests."[187]

The working of metals and agriculture have been the two great agents in this revolution. For the poet it is gold and silver, but for the philosopher it is iron and corn, that have civilised men and undone the human race. It is easy to see how the latter of the two arts was suggested to men by watching the reproducing processes of vegetation. It is less easy to be sure how they discovered metal, saw its uses, and invented means of smelting it, for nature had taken extreme precautions to hide the fatal secret. It was probably the operation of some volcano which first suggested the idea of fusing ore. From the fact of land being cultivated its division followed, and therefore the institution of property in its full shape. From property arose civil society. "The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, could think of saying, This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and horrors would not have been spared to the human race by one who, plucking up the stakes, or filling in the trench, should have called out to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you forget that the earth belongs to no one, and that its fruits are for all."[188]