Rousseau

Second Discourse (5] The Philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of going back as far as the state of Nature, bur none of them has reached it. Sorne have not hesitated to ascribe to Man 1n that state the notion of the Just and the Unjust, without bothering to show that he had to have this notion, or even that it would have been useful to him; Others have spoken of every- one’s Natural Right to keep what belongs to him, without explaining what they understood by belong; Others sull, after first granting to the stronger authority over the weaker, had Government arise straightway, without giving thought to the time that must have elapsed before the language of authonty and of government could have meaning among Men: Finally, all of them, continually speak- ing of need, greed, oppression, desires, and pride transferred to the state of Nature 1deas they had taken from society; They spoke of Savage Man and depicted Civil man, It did not even enter the mind of most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of Narure had existed whereas it is evident, from reading the Holy Scriptures, that the first Man having received some lights and Precepts immediately from God was not himself in that state, and that, if the Writings of Moses are granted the credence owed them by every Christian Philosopher, it has to be denied that, even before the Flood, Men were ever in the pure state of Nature, unless they relapsed into it by some extraordinary Occurrence: a Paradox most embarrassing to defend, and altogether impossible to prove. [6] Let us therefore begin by setting aside all the facts, for they do not affect the question. [733] The Inquiries that may be pursued regarding this Subject ought not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings; better suited to elucidate the Nature of things than to show their genuine origin, and comparable to those our Physicists daily make regarding the formation of the World. Religion commands us to believe that since God himself drew Men out of the state of Nature immediately after the creation, they are unequal because he wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to form conjectures based solely on the nature of man and of the Beings that surround him, about what Mankind might have become if 1t had remained abandoned to itself. This 1s what [ am asked, and what I propose to examine in this Discourse. Smce my subject concerns man in general, I shall try to speak in a language suited to all Nations, or rather, forgettirig 132