question on the 《The Essential Writings of Rousseau》
write a 300 words to Compare at least two of the four Declarations, and note an interesting difference in their style or their philosophical basis. What do you think might explain that difference? What is the significance of that difference?
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CONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
ALSO BY JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
TITLE PAGE
INTRODUCTION by Leo Damrosch
DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS OF INEQUALITY AMONG MEN
[COMPLETE]
ON THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, OR, PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL RIGHT [COMPLETE]
MILE, OR, ON EDUCATION
JULIE, OR, THE NEW HLOSE
CONFESSIONS
REVERIES OF THE SOLITARY WALKER
TIMELINE
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
NOTES
FURTHER READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE
COPYRIGHT
About the Author
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born in Geneva in 1712. He was a writer and
political theorist of the Enlightenment. In 1750 he published his first
important work A Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts (1750) where he
argued that man had become corrupted by society and civilisation. In 1755,
he published Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and in The Social
Contract (1762) he argued, Man is born free, and everywhere he is in
chains. This political treatise earned him exile from his home city of Geneva
and arguably inspired the French Revolution (his ashes were transferred to
the Pantheon in Paris in 1794). He also wrote mile, a treatise on education
and The New Eloise (1761). This novel scandalised the French authorities
who ordered Rousseaus arrest. In his last 10 years, Rousseau wrote his
Confessions. In Confessions he remembers his adventurous life, his
achievements and the persecution he suffered from opponents. His
revelations inspired the likes of Proust, Goethe and Tolstoy among others.
Rousseau died on 2 July in France in 1778.
Peter Constantines honours include the PEN Translation Prize, the National
Translation Award, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, and Greeces
Translators of Literature Prize. He translated Machiavellis The Prince for
Vintage Classics.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
PETER CONSTANTINE, winner of the PEN Translation Prize and a National
Translation Award, has earned wide acclaim for his translations of The
Undiscovered Chekhov and of the complete works of Isaac Babel, as well as
for his Modern Library translations, which include Gogols Taras Bulba,
Voltaires Candide, Machiavellis The Prince, and Tolstoys The Cossacks.
ALSO BY JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
Narcissus
Discourse on Political Economy
Pygmalion
Confessions
Constitutional Project for Corsica
Considerations on the Government of Poland
Essay on the Origin of Languages
JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU
The Essential Writings of Jean-
Jacques Rousseau
TRANSLATED BY
Peter Constantine
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Leo Damrosch
INTRODUCTION
Leo Damrosch
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was the most original thinker in the great movement
known as the Enlightenment, although he was probably not the best at any
single thing, nor did he aspire to be. Unlike Voltaire or Hume or Diderot,
Rousseau had never been a brilliant student; in fact he was never a student at
all. Entirely self-taught, he freely acknowledged the handicaps that that
entailed. But as an outsider who saw eighteenth-century culture from a
uniquely independent perspective, he penetrated to depths that nobody else
did. Instead of proposing gradual reforms in society, which was the normal
program of the Enlightenment, he mounted a profound critique of its
unexamined assumptions. In the sense in which the word philosophe means
an imaginative intellectual rather than a formal philosopher, Rousseau has a
claim to be considered the greatest of them all.
Indeed, Rousseau was so far ahead of his time that reviewers dismissed his
books as merely paradoxical. He cant really believe that was a frequent
reaction. But he said, I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of
prejudices,1 and as his challenge sank in, his influence grew. The
distinguished Rousseauian Jean Starobinski says of the groundbreaking
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, The immense echo of these words
expanded in time and space far beyond what Rousseau could have foreseen.2
Rousseau was born in the militantly Protestant city of Geneva in 1712, the
son of an affectionate but temperamental watchmaker named Isaac Rousseau.
Shortly after giving birth to him his mother died of an infection, and it has
been suggested that he bore a lifelong burden of guilt as a result. In later life
he idealized the compact city-stateGeneva was then an independent
republic, not yet part of Switzerlandand believed that it inspired his belief
in the emotional loyalty that citizens need to feel to their community. Praising
Genevan mores in a polemical work, he recalled a scene when a citizen
militia had finished drilling in the square below the apartment where he and
his father lived:
Most of them gathered after the meal in the Place Saint-Gervais and began dancing all
together, officers and soldiers, around the fountain, on to which drummers, fifers, and torch-
carriers had climbed. The women couldnt remain at their windows for long, and they came
down. Wives came to see their husbands, servants brought wine, and even the children,
awakened by the noise, ran around half-dressed among their fathers and mothers. The dance
was suspended, and there was only embracing, laughter, toasts, caresses. My father,
hugging me, was overcome by trembling in a way that I can still feel and share. Jean-
Jacques, he said to me, love your country! Do you see these good Genevans? They are all
friends, they are all brothers, joy and concord reign in their midst.3 [Translations in the
introduction are by Leo Damrosch.]
But between the lines in the autobiographical Confessions one senses a lonely
and discouraging childhood, which concluded in an apprenticeship from
which Rousseau impulsively ran away at the age of sixteen.
Mainly as a way of getting financial support, he converted to Catholicism.
After a year in Turin, during which he was reduced to working as a humble
lackey, he went to Annecy in the Savoy (not yet part of France) and became
the protg of a beautiful young Catholic convert named Mme de Warens.
Under her influence, and that of kindly priests and monks in her social circle,
he began to read seriously and to develop a lifelong passion for music. He
still had no plans, however, and it began to look as if he would always be a
drifter. When his patroness seduced him he was seriously alarmed, since he
regarded her as virtually his mother, while for her part she soon tired of
responsibility for an apparently shiftless young man.
In due course Rousseau moved to Lyon, where he took a job as tutor to
two small boys, and then to Paris. There he became close to Denis Diderot, a
brilliant polymath his own age, who did much to expand his thinking.
Meanwhile he acquired a partner for life, a young servant girl named Thrse
Levasseur. Their relationship was in effect a common-law marriage, but
never a legal one, and when Thrse bore five children, Rousseau insisted on
consigning them to a home for foundlings. Years later his reputation would
be seriously damaged when Voltaire, who hated him, made this conduct
public.
In 1749, when Rousseau was thirty-seven, he set out on foot to visit
Diderot, who had been incarcerated in the chteau of Vincennes near Paris
because of irreligious hints he had published. (To assure ongoing publication
of the great Encyclopdie, of which he was co-editor, Diderot promised never
to transgress again and was released.) Pausing to rest, Rousseau idly opened a
newspaper and found his life permanently changed. The obscure Academy of
Dijon was offering a prize for the best essay on the topic Whether the
restoration of the sciences and arts has contributed to purify morals. It was a
trite question, practically taking for granted an affirmative answer, but when
Rousseau suddenly saw a new way of arguing the negative, I beheld a
different universe and became a different man. He was overcome by
dizziness like that of drunkenness, his heart pounded, and tears drenched
his shirt. Under a tree, he scribbled a speech by an ancient Roman who
returns from the past to denounce modern sophistication, crying, Madmen,
what have you done? Rousseau won the prize, his Discourse on the Sciences
and Arts was published, and it was an immediate sensation.
The more searching Discourse on the Origin of Inequality followed in
1755, and in 176162, in the space of eighteen months, Rousseau produced
no fewer than three great books. Julie, or, The New Hlose, a novel about
romantic passion transformed into friendship, became an international
bestseller. mile, or, On Education, urging that children should be allowed to
develop their individual talents, has influenced educational reforms ever
since. And the Social Contract, insisting that a government gains legitimacy
only from the shared commitment of its citizens, would have explosive effect
a generation later.
Rousseau was now a celebrated writer in a remarkable range of fields, and
in fact his work was far from miscellaneous, sinceas he said himselfit all
flowed from a single foundational idea. Man, he held, is naturally good, and
it is society that has made him wicked. In those days, whatever was wrong in
the world was conventionally ascribed by preachers to the sin of pride, and
by political theorists to insubordination against superiors. Rousseau held that
in the state of nature, natural man would have been self-sufficient and
uncompetitive, and although civilization has brought benefits that we can no
longer bear to give up, we should strive to recover as much of our natural
selves as we can. In romantic relationships, we should break free from
possessive passion; in education, we should encourage individuality to
blossom; and in politics, we should respect the freedom of the individual.
The heart of Rousseaus thinking, his fundamental paradox, was to honor
individualism but at the same time to submit it to a devastating critique.
Progressive writers in the Enlightenment thought that the good of society was
served by competition among individuals, who find it in their own interest to
cooperate as well as compete; Adam Smith extolled the virtues of sociability
even as he called for a free market. Rousseau took a more pessimistic view of
self-interest, like that of seventeenth-century moralists such as Pascal, who
said grimly in his Penses, Each me is the enemy of all the others, and
would like to be their tyrant.4 But whereas Pascal ascribed selfishness to
original sin, Rousseau ascribed it to society, and he imagined a new kind of
society in which every individual, in uniting with everyone else, will still
only be answerable to himself and remain as free as before.5
From social criticism, Rousseaus thinking naturally moved to individual
psychology. In his own life he had experienced the ways in which a trusting,
affectionate child could become selfish and dishonest, and he now preached
an ideal of sincerity in which inside and outside would be in harmony, as
he believed they once were for natural man. Eventually he had to
acknowledge that it was harder to be sincere than he first thought, but this,
too, produced a striking insight: we are conditioned so effectively to play
artificial roles that we mistake them for our true nature. Rousseau saw that
when he had been acting as a righteous counterculture critic, truth telling had
actually been a kind of playacting:
I was no longer that timid person, more shamefaced than modest, who didnt dare to introduce
himself or speak, whom a playful word would disconcert and a womans glance would cause
to blush. The contempt that my profound meditations inspired for the mores, maxims, and
prejudices of the age made me impervious to the mockery of those who entertained them, and I
crushed their little bon mots with my pronouncements as I would have crushed an insect
between my fingers.6
Most of the philosophes took it for granted that we are by nature role-
players and in fact are defined by our roles. Rousseau, inner-directed rather
than other-directed, sought what would later be known as authenticity:
commitment to a true self that lies deeper than any role. In a riposte to
Diderots treatise The Paradox of the Actor, he described the skill of
accomplished performers as simply a specialized version of what everyone is
conditioned to do. In an eloquent critique that has much in common with the
Calvinist values of his native Geneva, and also with Platos rejection of the
arts in The Republic, he rose to moral outrage:
What is the talent of the actor? The art of counterfeiting himself, clothing himself with another
character than his own, appearing different than he is, becoming passionate in cold blood,
saying something other than what he thinks as naturally as if he really thought it, and at last
forgetting his own place by taking someone elses. What is the profession of the actor? A trade
by which he gives himself in performance for money, submits himself to the ignominy and
affronts that people buy the right to give him, and puts his person publicly on sale.7
This was not conventional moralizing but serious reflection on the insight
that civilization encourages and rewards inauthentic behavior.
During these years, Rousseau was still living in France, but his religious
and political ideas provoked official outrage there. The Catholic Church,
which controlled education and censored every legally published book, was
scandalized by the liberal treatment of religion in mile. The Social Contract
was similarly unacceptable to the authoritarian monarchy, and both books
were publicly burned. Other philosophes often held subversive views, but
they published them anonymously. Rousseau defiantly signed his own name
to his books, and he was singled out as a scapegoat for the entire
Enlightenment movement. A warrant was issued for his arrest, and he was
given warning just in time to flee the country.
Return to Geneva was impossible, even though he had reconverted to
Protestantism, since mile and the Social Contract were proscribed there,
too. Instead, he made his way to the territory of Neuchtel, ruled at that time
by Frederick the Great of Prussia, who liked to think of himself as a
philosopher king. Thrse soon followed, replying when Rousseau said he
would understand if she didnt share in his persecution, My heart has always
been yours and will never change, so long as God gives you life and me as
well. I would go to join you even if I had to cross oceans and precipices.8
Three years later, after local Calvinist ministers stirred up mob hostility on
account of Rousseaus religious views, he and Thrse were driven from
Switzerland, too. At the invitation of David Hume they moved to England, in
what proved a highly unfortunate choice. Rather than stay in London, where
French was widely understood, they retreated to a remote village in the
Midlands, and by the end of a bitterly cold winter Rousseau had become
alarmingly paranoid. Convinced that Hume, of all people, was masterminding
a vast plot against him, he fled back to France and went into hiding there.
Eventually he resolved to return to Paris and confront his accusers. They
failed to appear. By that time he had ceased publishing, and the authorities
were reluctant to make a martyr of him.
So Rousseau lived out his final decade in Paris, enjoying music and
pursuing an avocation of collecting plants in the countryside. Speaking of
himself in his late, unpublished Dialogues, he explained: It is through
idleness, nonchalance, and aversion to dependency and bother that Jean-
Jacques copies music. He does his task as and when it pleases him; he doesnt
have to account for his day, his time, his labor, or his leisure to anyone.
He is himself, and for himself, all day and every day.9 In effect he was
trying to re-create the condition of natural man.
The paranoia remained, but it was successfully compartmentalized, a
firewall that enabled Rousseau to avoid uncomfortable contact with strangers
and to enjoy the simple pleasures of life. The younger writer Bernardin de
Saint-Pierre, who often accompanied him on his walks, recalled an eloquent
comment of his on the singing of the nightingale: Our musicians have all
imitated its high and low notes, its runs and capriccios, but what characterizes
itits prolonged piping, its sobs, the sighing sounds that go to the soul and
pervade its songthat is what no one has been able to capture.10
A collision in the street with a galloping Great Dane resulted in concussion
and lasting brain damage, and Rousseau died of a cerebral hemorrhage in
1778, at the age of sixty-six.
After his death several posthumous works were published, most notably
the great Confessions, which stands with its namesake by Saint Augustine as
the most original and influential auto biographies ever written. Rousseau
seems to have been literally the first writer to do what now seems inevitable,
to seek the roots of personality in early relationships and experiences. The
title of Marcel Prousts great cycle of novels, la Recherche du Temps
Perdu, could easily be Rousseaus: In Search of Lost Time. His richest
recoveries of the past are concentrated in the first three books of the twelve-
book Confessions, which are included in their entirety in this volume.
One of the most memorable passages in the later books recreates a
sensation of unalloyed contentment that Rousseau liked to call le sentiment
de lexistence, the consciousness of simply being alive. He and Mme de
Warens had just moved to a country house known as Les Charmettes:
Here begins the brief happiness of my life; here come the peaceful but rapid moments that
have given me the right to say I have lived. Precious moments that I miss so much, ah! begin
again for me your pleasant course; flow more slowly in my memory, if that is possible, than
you actually did in your fleeting succession. If all of that consisted in doings, in actions, in
words, I would be able to describe and render it to some extent; but how can I say what was
never said, or done, or even thought, but tasted and felt, so that I can name no object for my
happiness except the feeling itself? I got up with the sun and was happy, I took a walk and was
happy, I saw Maman [Mme de Warens] and was happy, I left her and was happy, I roamed the
woods and hills, I wandered in the valleys, I read, I was idle, I worked in the garden, I gathered
fruit, I helped around the house, and happiness followed me everywhere. It wasnt in any
single thing one could identify, it was entirely in myself, and it couldnt leave me for a single
moment.11
In truth, this was a flight of imagination more than an accurate reminiscence;
we know from Rousseaus letters that most of the time at Les Charmettes he
lived alone, unhappy and neglected.
Rousseaus influence as an analyst of culture developed gradually; his
influence as a political thinker bore fruit more immediately. When Thomas
Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, two years before
Rousseaus death, that all men are created equal and possess unalienable
rights, he was using Rousseauian language. And in 1789 the political time
bomb of the Social Contract burst. The leaders of the French Revolution,
with their ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, hailed Rousseau as a
prophet. His remains were reinterred with immense pomp in the Panthon in
Paris, and according to the official account of the occasion, The moon that
shed its pale and colorless light gave this procession the aspect of those
ancient mysteries whose initiates were pure or washed clean of their faults.
Especially notable was a delegation from his native city, marching with a
banner that read Aristocratic Geneva proscribed him, a regenerated Geneva
has avenged his memory.12
In the ensuing years Rousseaus influence continued to spread.
Romanticism, with its emphasis on originality, imagination, and oneness with
nature, was profoundly in his debt. The growing recognition that
governments should reflect their peoples will, together with the conviction
that social inequality is intrinsically unjust, have profound roots in his
thought. The concept of childhood as a crucially formative stage of
development is Rousseauian at its heart. And psychoanalysis, searching for
hidden foundations of the self, carries forward the quest that he launched in
the Confessions.
Rousseau never wanted to found a system, and he didnt. His mission was
to expose the unreconciled conflicts that make human life so difficult and that
conventional systems of politics and education and psychology try to iron
out. At a friends house, he once took a peach from the bottom of a pyramid
of fruit, upon which the whole thing fell down. Thats what you always do
with all our systems, she commented; you pull down with a single touch,
but who will build up what you pull down?13 By pulling down, he
challenged later generations to build up again in new ways, and his style of
questioning has become inseparable from our culture. The friends of
Rousseau, one friend of his remarked, are as though related to each other
through his soul, which has joined them across countries, ranks, fortune, and
even centuries.14 Many people who have barely heard of him are, at a deep
level, friends of Rousseau.
LEO DAMROSCH, is Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature at
Harvard University. He is the author of numerous books, including
Tocquevilles Discovery of America and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless
Genius, a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award in nonfiction.
DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATIONS OF
INEQUALITY AMONG MEN
In 1755, five years after Rousseaus Discourse on the Sciences and Arts made him
unexpectedly famous, he once again responded to an essay competition announced by the
Academy of Dijon. The topic this time was What is the origin of inequality among men, and is
it authorized by natural law? The Academy rejected his submission because it greatly
exceeded the length limit, which didnt matter to Rousseau, because it was immediately
published and proved to be a work of extraordinary originality.
Instead of tracing the phenomenon of inequality historically, as would have been usual at
the time, this second Discourse is a thought experiment that attempts to discover what would
be truly natural to human beings if society had never shaped them at all. Natural man is
imagined as essentially an animal, solitary and unsocial, open to feeling but with no need of
reason, and with no wish or occasion to exploit other people. The development of society
brought with it much that was good, particularly the mutual love and support of family life,
and we could never return to the state of nature. But the negative consequences have been
immense: the very fact of needing other human beings has led everywhere to joyless labor,
inequality, and oppression. Rousseaus central messageimmensely influential in later
generationsis that social inequality is universal but it is also wrong. Still, to the extent that
natural man survives at a deep level inside us, we can try to live according to Nature and to
open ourselves to spontaneity of feeling.
PREFACE
The most useful of the natural sciences, yet the least advanced, strikes me as
being the science of man, and I will venture to say that at the Temple of
Delphi the only inscription contained a precept more important and difficult
than all the copious volumes of the moralists.15 I also regard the subject of
the following discourse as consisting of the most interesting questions that
philosophy can propose and, unfortunately for us, one of the most contentious
that the philosophers seek to resolve. For how can we understand the source
of the inequality among men if we do not begin by understanding them? And
how can man ultimately succeed in seeing himself as nature formed him
through all the changes that the succession of time and circumstances must
have produced in his original constitution, and disentangle what is innate in
him from what circumstances and his progress have added or changed in his
original state? Like the statue of Glaucus, which time, the sea, and storms had
so disfigured that it resembled less a god than a wild beast, the human soul,
altered in the bosom of society by a thousand perpetually recurring causes, by
the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and multitude of errors, by the
changes befalling the constitution of the body and by the continual impact of
the passions, has changed so as to be hardly recognizable.16 And one no
longer finds beings that always act according to firm and invariable
principles, beings with the celestial and majestic simplicity that their creator
imprinted on them; instead one finds the misshapen contrast of a passion that
believes it reasons and an understanding that is frenzied.
What is even more cruel is that all progress made by the human species
ceaselessly moves it ever further from its original state: the more discoveries
we make and the more new knowledge we accumulate, the more we deprive
ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all, and
it is in a sense, through studying man that we have made ourselves incapable
of knowing him.
It is clear that it is in these successive changes of the human constitution
that one must look for the initial origin of the differences that distinguish men
who were, by common consent, naturally as equal among one another as the
animals of every species until diverse physical causes introduced the varieties
that we see in them. In fact, it is not conceivable that these first changes,
however they may have come about, would have altered all the individuals of
a species at once and in the same manner; while some would have been
improved or caused to deteriorate, having acquired various good or bad
qualities that were not inherent in their nature, others would have remained
longer in their original state. Such was the first source of inequality among
men, and it is easier to present it in general terms such as these than to assign
its true causes with precision.
Let my readers therefore not imagine that I dare flatter myself at having
seen what seems to me so difficult to see. I have initiated some arguments
and hazarded a few conjectures, less in the hope of resolving the question
than with the intention of shedding light on its true state. Others will be able
to go further along the same path without it being easy for anyone to reach
the end, since it is not an easy task to disentangle what is original from what
is artificial in mans present nature, and to know well a state that no longer
exists and that perhaps never has existed nor ever will, and yet of which it is
necessary to have precise notions in order to judge our present state
correctly.17 He who would undertake to determine the precise steps necessary
to make sound observations on this subject would certainly need more
philosophy than one would imagine, and a good solution to the following
problem strikes me as being worthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our day:
What experiments would be necessary to achieve an understanding of
natural man, and what are the methods by which such experiments should be
conducted within society? Far from undertaking to resolve this question, I
believe I have meditated enough on the subject to dare reply in advance that
the greatest philosophers would not be suitable for conducting these
experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns to perform them. It is hardly
reasonable to expect such a collaboration to succeed, particularly as it would
need perseverance, or rather a confluence of intellect and goodwill on both
sides.
And yet such an investigation, which is so difficult to undertake and to
which until now such little thought has been given, is the only means left to
us of dispersing a multitude of difficulties that prevent our knowing the true
foundations of human society. It is the ignorance of mans nature that casts so
much uncertainty and obscurity on the true definition of natural right: for the
idea of right, says Monsieur Burlamaqui,18 and even more that of natural
right, are incontestably ideas relating to the nature of man. It is from the very
nature of man, Monsieur Burlamaqui continues, and from his constitution and
condition, that the principles of this science must be deduced.
It is with some surprise or shock that one notes how little agreement
prevails on this important matter among the authors who have treated these
issues. Among the soundest, one will not find two who are of the same
opinion on this pointnot to mention the ancient philosophers, who seem to
have made it their mission to contradict one another on the most fundamental
principles. The Roman jurists indiscriminately placed man and all the other
animals under the same natural law, since they considered natural law the law
that nature imposes upon itself rather than the one it prescribes; or because of
the specific meaning under which these jurists understood the word law,
which in this instance they seem to have taken to mean the expression of the
general relations established by nature among all animate beings for their
preservation. As men of our era understand law only to mean a rule
prescribed to a moral being (that is to say, a being that is intelligent, free, and
considered in its relation to other beings), they consequently restrict the
domain of natural law to the only animal endowed with reason, that is to say
man. But while they all define this law in their own way, they base it on such
metaphysical principles that there are, even among us, very few people
capable of understanding them, let alone discovering them of their own
accord. Accordingly, all the definitions provided by these learned men, who
are otherwise in perpetual disagreement with one another, agree only on this
point: that it is impossible to understand the law of nature, and consequently
to obey it, without being a truly great thinker and profound metaphysician.
What this means is that for the establishment of society, men have had to
employ an intelligence that develops only with great difficulty, and for very
few people, in the bosom of society itself.
With such limited knowledge of nature and such a lack of agreement on
the meaning of the word law, it would be quite difficult to agree on an
adequate definition of natural law. Consequently, all the definitions found in
books have, besides the defect of lacking in consistency, the further defect of
being derived from several fields of knowledge that men do not have
innately, and from advantages of which they cannot conceive until after they
have left the state of nature.19 One begins by considering what rules would be
appropriate for men to establish among themselves for the common interest,
and one then gives the name natural law to the collection of these rules
without any other proof than the good that one feels would result from their
universal implementation. This is certainly a convenient way of creating
definitions and explaining the nature of things through concurrences that are
almost arbitrary.
But so long as we do not know man in his natural condition, it is in vain
that we seek to determine the law that he has received or the one that best
suits his constitution. The only thing about this law we can see clearly is that
for it to be a law, the will of him whom it binds must be able to submit
himself to it consciously; but in order for this law to be natural, it must also
speak immediately with the voice of nature.
Casting aside all the scientific books that only teach us to see men as they
have made themselves, and reflecting on the first and most simple operation
of the human spirit, I believe I perceive two principles antecedent to reason,
of which one interests us intensely in our well-being and self-preservation,
and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance at seeing any sentient being,
particularly a fellow human, perish or suffer. It is from the collaboration and
combination of the two principles of which our minds are capable, without it
being necessary to introduce the principle of sociability, that, it seems to me,
all the rules of natural law flow; rules that reason is then forced to reestablish
on other foundations when, by its successive development
