A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind | Page 7

to wind itself up, and guard, to a certain degree, against everything that
might destroy or disorder it. I perceive the very same things in the human machine, with
this difference, that nature alone operates in all the operations of the beast, whereas man,
as a free agent, has a share in his. One chooses by instinct; the other by an act of liberty;
for which reason the beast cannot deviate from the rules that have been prescribed to it,
even in cases where such deviation might be useful, and man often deviates from the
rules laid down for him to his prejudice. Thus a pigeon would starve near a dish of the
best flesh-meat, and a cat on a heap of fruit or corn, though both might very well support
life with the food which they thus disdain, did they but bethink themselves to make a trial
of it: it is in this manner dissolute men run into excesses, which bring on fevers and death
itself; because the mind depraves the senses, and when nature ceases to speak, the will
still continues to dictate.
All animals must be allowed to have ideas, since all animals have senses; they even

combine their ideas to a certain degree, and, in this respect, it is only the difference of
such degree, that constitutes the difference between man and beast: some philosophers
have even advanced, that there is a greater difference between some men and some others,
than between some men and some beasts; it is not therefore so much the understanding
that constitutes, among animals, the specifical distinction of man, as his quality of a free
agent. Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels the same
impression, but he at the same time perceives that he is free to resist or to acquiesce; and
it is in the consciousness of this liberty, that the spirituality of his soul chiefly appears:
for natural philosophy explains, in some measure, the mechanism of the senses and the
formation of ideas; but in the power of willing, or rather of choosing, and in the
consciousness of this power, nothing can be discovered but acts, that are purely spiritual,
and cannot be accounted for by the laws of mechanics.
But though the difficulties, in which all these questions are involved, should leave some
room to dispute on this difference between man and beast, there is another very specific
quality that distinguishes them, and a quality which will admit of no dispute; this is the
faculty of improvement; a faculty which, as circumstances offer, successively unfolds all
the other faculties, and resides among us not only in the species, but in the individuals
that compose it; whereas a beast is, at the end of some months, all he ever will be during
the rest of his life; and his species, at the end of a thousand years, precisely what it was
the first year of that long period. Why is man alone subject to dotage? Is it not, because
he thus returns to his primitive condition? And because, while the beast, which has
acquired nothing and has likewise nothing to lose, continues always in possession of his
instinct, man, losing by old age, or by accident, all the acquisitions he had made in
consequence of his perfectibility, thus falls back even lower than beasts themselves? It
would be a melancholy necessity for us to be obliged to allow, that this distinctive and
almost unlimited faculty is the source of all man's misfortunes; that it is this faculty,
which, though by slow degrees, draws them out of their original condition, in which his
days would slide away insensibly in peace and innocence; that it is this faculty, which, in
a succession of ages, produces his discoveries and mistakes, his virtues and his vices, and,
at long run, renders him both his own and nature's tyrant. It would be shocking to be
obliged to commend, as a beneficent being, whoever he was that first suggested to the
Oronoco Indians the use of those boards which they bind on the temples of their children,
and which secure to them the enjoyment of some part at least of their natural imbecility
and happiness.
Savage man, abandoned by nature to pure instinct, or rather indemnified for that which
has perhaps been denied to him by faculties capable of immediately supplying the place
of it, and of raising him afterwards a great deal higher, would therefore begin with
functions that were merely animal: to see and to feel would be his first condition, which
he would enjoy in common with other animals. To will and not to will, to wish and to
fear, would be the first, and in a manner, the only operations of his soul, till new
circumstances