{1} Discourse on the Sciences
and the Arts

{2} Rousseau read the advertisement announcing the competition established by the Academy of Dijon in October 1749 while on his way to visit Diderot in prison in Vincennes, outside Paris. Immediately the whole of his Discourse flashed through his mind, and he quickly wrote down a key section, the speech of Fabricius. This moment of revelation transformed his life. By March 1750, the Discourse was finished, in July it was awarded the prize, by December it was in print. Rousseau felt obliged to publish the text he had submitted, although he had been working on revisions (he added only two brief passages). At once everyone was talking about it. Rousseau had acquired an unshakeable reputation as an author addicted to paradox. Rousseau spent much of 1751 and 1752 writing replies to his many critics (seventy-five reviews and critiques were published within three years). Naturally he was well aware from the beginning of the contradiction in being an educated person (albeit self-educated) attacking education, a modern author arguing that the world would be better off without books, a man of letters praising action and condemning words, and a resident of France praising liberty and equality. His epigraph from Ovid predicts the whole of his future.

D.W.

{3} DISCOURSE
THAT WON THE PRIZE
ON THE ACADEMY OF DIJON¹
IN THE YEAR 1750

On this Question Proposed by that Academy:
Whether the Restoration of the Sciences and the Arts
Contributed to the Purification of Mores²

BY A CITIZEN OF GENEVA

“Here I am the barbarian because they do not understand me.”
—Ovid³

{4} FOREWORD⁴

What is celebrity? Here is the unhappy work to which I owe mine. Certainly this piece, which earned me a prize and made a name for me, is at best mediocre, and I dare to add that it is one of the least of this collection.⁵ What an abyss of miseries the author would have avoided, had his first work been received as it deserved to be! But it was inevitable that a favor, unjust from the beginning, visited upon me by degrees a stiff penalty that is even more unjust.

DISCOURSE ON THE SCIENCES AND THE ARTS⁶

PREFACE

Here is one of the great and finest questions ever debated. This discourse is not concerned with those metaphysical subtleties that have found their way into every branch of learning and from which academy-sponsored competitions are not always exempt. Rather, it is concerned with one of those truths that are bound up with the happiness of mankind.

I foresee that I will not easily be forgiven for the side I have dared to choose. Running head-on into everything that men admire today, I can expect only universal blame; and the fact of having been honored by the approval of a few wise men does not lead me to count on the approval of the public. Thus I have taken my stand. I do not care about pleasing either the witty or the fashionable. There will always be men destined to be subjugated by the opinions of their century, their country, their society. A man who plays the freethinker and the philosopher today would, for the same reason, have merely been a fanatic at the time of the League.⁷ One should not write for such readers when one wants to live beyond one’s century.

One more word and I have finished. Counting little on the honor that I have received, I had, since sending it, recast and enlarged this discourse to the point of, in a sense, making another work of it. Today I believe I am obliged to restore it to the state in which it was awarded the prize. I have merely inserted some notes and allowed two easily recognized additions to remain, {5} of which the Academy might perhaps not have approved. I thought that fair-mindedness, respect, and gratitude demanded this notice from me.

DISCOURSE

“We are deceived by the appearance of right.”⁸

Has the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to the purification of mores or to their corruption? That is what is to be examined. Which side should I take in this question? The one, gentlemen, that is appropriate to an honest man who knows nothing and who thinks no less of himself for it.

It will be difficult, I feel, to adapt what I have to say to the tribunal before which I appear. How can I dare to blame the sciences before one of Europe’s most learned societies, praise ignorance in a famous academy, and reconcile contempt for study with respect for the truly learned? I have seen these points of conflict, and they have not daunted me. I am not abusing science, I told myself; I am defending virtue before virtuous men. Integrity is dearer to good men than erudition is to the studious. What then have I to fear? The enlightenment of the assembly that listens to me? I admit it; but this is owing to the composition of the discourse and not to the sentiment of the speaker. Fair-minded sovereigns have never hesitated to pass judgments against themselves in disputes whose outcomes are uncertain; and the position most advantageous for a just cause is to have to defend oneself against an upright and enlightened opponent who is judge in his own case.

To this motive that heartens me is joined another that determines me, namely that, having upheld, according to my natural light, the side of truth, whatever my success, there is a prize that I cannot fail to receive; I will find it within the depths of my heart.

PART ONE

It is a grand and beautiful sight to see man emerge somehow from nothing by his own efforts; dissipate, by the light of his reason, the shadows in which nature had enveloped him; rise above himself; soar by means of his mind into the heavenly regions; traverse, like the sun, the vast expanse of the universe with giant steps; and, what is even grander and more difficult, return to himself in order to study man and know his nature, his duties, and his end. All of these marvels have been revived in the past few generations.

Europe had relapsed into the barbarism of the first ages. A few centuries ago the peoples of that part of the world, who today live such enlightened {6} lives, lived in a state worse than ignorance. An incomprehensible scientific jargon, even more contemptible than ignorance, had usurped the name of knowledge and posed a nearly invincible obstacle to its return. A revolution was needed to bring men back to common sense; it finally came from the least expected quarter. It was the stupefied Moslem, the eternal scourge of letters, who caused them to be reborn among us. The fall of the throne of Constantinople⁹ brought into Italy the debris of ancient Greece. France in turn was enriched by these precious spoils. Soon the sciences followed letters. To the art of writing was joined the art of thinking—a sequence of events that may seem strange, but which perhaps is only too natural. And the chief advantage of commerce with the Muses began to be felt, namely, that of making men more sociable by inspiring in them the desire to please one another with works worthy of their mutual approval.

The mind has its needs, as does the body. The needs of the latter are the foundations of society; the needs of the former make it pleasant. While the government and the laws see to the safety and well-being of assembled men, the sciences, letters, and the arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which they are burdened, stifle in them the sense of that original liberty for which they seem to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what are called civilized peoples.¹⁰ Need raised up thrones; the sciences and the arts have strengthened them. Earthly powers, love talents and protect those who cultivate them!¹¹ Civilized peoples, cultivate them! Happy slaves, you owe them that delicate and refined taste on which you pride yourselves, that sweetness of character and that urbanity in mores that make relationships among you so cordial and easy, in a word, the appearances of all the virtues without having any.

By this sort of civility, all the more agreeable as it puts on fewer airs, Athens and Rome once distinguished themselves in the much vaunted days of their magnificence and splendor. By it our century and our nation will doubtlessly surpass all times and all peoples. A philosophic tone without pedantry, {7} manners natural yet engaging, equally removed from Teutonic rusticity as from Italian pantomime, these are the fruits of the taste acquired by good schooling and perfected in social interaction.

How sweet it would be to live among us, if outer appearances were always the likeness of the heart’s dispositions, if decency were virtue, if our maxims served as our rules, if true philosophy were inseparable from the title of philosopher! But so many qualities are all too rarely found in combination, and virtue seldom goes forth in such great pomp. Expensive finery can betoken a wealthy man, and elegance a man of taste. The healthy and robust man is recognized by other signs. It is in the rustic clothing of the fieldworker and not underneath the gilding of the courtier that one will find bodily strength and vigor. Finery is no less alien to virtue, which is the strength and vigor of the soul. The good man is an athlete who enjoys competing in the nude.¹² He is contemptuous of all those vile ornaments that would impair the use of his strength, most of which were invented merely to conceal some deformity.

Before art had fashioned our manners and taught our passions to speak an affected language, our mores were rustic but natural, and differences in behavior heralded, at first glance, differences of character. At base, human nature was no better, but men found their safety in the ease with which they saw through each other, and that advantage, which we no longer value, spared them many vices.

Today, when more subtle inquiries and a more refined taste have reduced the art of pleasing to established rules, a vile and deceitful uniformity reigns in our mores, and all minds seem to have been cast in the same mold. Without ceasing, politeness makes demands, propriety gives orders; without ceasing, common customs are followed, never one’s own lights. One no longer dares to seem what one really is; and in this perpetual constraint, the men who make up this herd we call society will, if placed in the same circumstances, do all the same things unless stronger motives deter them. Thus no one will ever really know those with whom he is dealing. Hence in order to know one’s friend, it would be necessary to wait for critical occasions, that is, to wait until it is too late, since it is for these very occasions that it would have been essential to know him.

What a retinue of vices must attend this incertitude! No more sincere friendships, no more real esteem, no more well-founded confidence. Suspicions, offenses, fears, coldness, reserve, hatred, betrayal will unceasingly hide under that uniform and deceitful veil of politeness, under that much vaunted urbanity that we owe to the enlightenment of our century. The name of the master of the universe will no longer be profaned with oaths; rather it will be insulted with blasphemies without our scrupulous ears being offended by them. No one will boast of his own merit, but will disparage that of others. No one will crudely wrong his enemy, but will skillfully slander him. National {8} hatreds will die out, but so will love of country. Scorned ignorance will be replaced by a dangerous Pyrrhonism. Some excesses will be forbidden, some vices held in dishonor, but others will be adorned with the name of virtues. One must either have them or affect them. Let those who wish extol the sobriety of the wise men of the present. For my part, I see in it merely a refinement of intemperance as unworthy of my praise as their artful simplicity.¹³

Such is the purity that our mores have acquired. Thus have we become decent men. It is for letters, the sciences, and the arts to claim their part in so wholesome an achievement. I will add but one thought: an inhabitant of some distant lands who sought to form an idea of European mores on the basis of the state of the sciences among us, the perfection of our arts, the seemliness of our theatrical performances, the civilized quality of our manners, the affability of our speech, our perpetual displays of goodwill, and that tumultuous competition of men of every age and circumstance who, from morning to night, seem intent on being obliging to one another—that foreigner, I say, would guess our mores to be exactly the opposite of what they are.

Where there is no effect, there is no cause to seek out. But here the effect is certain, the depravation real, and our souls have become corrupted in proportion as our sciences and our arts have advanced toward perfection. Will it be said that this is a misfortune peculiar to our age? No, gentlemen, the evils caused by our vain curiosity are as old as the world. The daily rise and fall of the ocean’s waters have not been more unvaryingly subjected to the celestial body that provides us with light during the night than has the fate of mores and integrity been to the progress of the sciences and the arts. Virtue has been seen taking flight in proportion as their light rose on our horizon, and the same phenomenon has been observed in all times and in all places.

Consider Egypt, that first school of the universe, that climate so fertile beneath a brazen sky, that famous country from which Sesostris¹⁴ departed long ago to conquer the world. She became the mother of philosophy and the fine arts and soon thereafter was conquered by Cambyses,¹⁵ then by Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and finally Turks.

Consider Greece, formerly populated by heroes who twice conquered Asia, once at Troy and once on their own home ground. Nascent letters had not yet brought corruption into the hearts of her inhabitants; but the progress of the arts, the dissolution of mores, and the Macedonian’s yoke followed {9} closely upon one another; and Greece, ever learned, ever voluptuous, and ever the slave, experienced nothing in her revolutions but changes of masters. All the eloquence of Demosthenes could never revive a body that luxury and the arts had enervated.

It is at the time of the likes of Ennius and Terence¹⁶ that Rome, founded by a shepherd and made famous by fieldworkers, began to degenerate. But after the likes of Ovid, Catullus, Martial,¹⁷ and that crowd of obscene writers whose names alone offend modesty, Rome, formerly the temple of virtue, became the theater of crime, the disgrace of nations, and the plaything of barbarians. Finally, that capital of the world falls under the yoke that she had imposed on so many peoples, and the day of her fall was the eve of the day when one of her citizens was given the title of Arbiter of Good Taste.¹⁸ What shall I say about that capital of the Eastern Empire, which, by virtue of its location, seemed destined to be the capital of the entire world, that refuge of the sciences and the arts banished from the rest of Europe—more perhaps out of wisdom than barbarism. All that is most shameful about debauchery and corruption; blackest in betrayals, assassinations, and poisons; most atrocious in the coexistence of every sort of crime, that is what constitutes the fabric of the history of Constantinople, that is the pure source whence radiates to us the enlightenment on which our century prides itself.

But why seek in remote times proofs of a truth for which we have existing evidence before our eyes? In Asia there is an immense country where acknowledgment in the field of letters leads to the highest offices of the state. If the sciences purified mores, if they taught men to shed their blood for their country, if they enlivened their courage, the peoples of China should be wise, free, and invincible. But if there is not a single vice that does not have mastery over them, not a single crime that is unfamiliar to them; if neither the enlightenment of the ministers, nor the alleged wisdom of the laws, nor the multitude of the inhabitants of that vast empire have been able to shield her from the yoke of the ignorant and coarse Tartar, what purpose have all her learned men served? What benefit has been derived from the honors bestowed upon them? Could it be to be peopled by slaves and wicked men?

{10} Contrast these scenes with that of the mores of the small number of peoples who, protected against this contagion of vain knowledge, have by their virtues brought about their own happiness and the model for other nations. Such were the first Persians, a singular nation in which virtue was learned just as science is among us, that subjugated Asia so easily, and that alone has enjoyed the distinction of having the history of its institutions taken for a philosophical novel.¹⁹ Such were the Scythians, about whom we have been left such magnificent praises. Such were the Germans, whose simplicity, innocence, and virtues a pen—weary of tracing the crimes and atrocities of an educated, opulent, and voluptuous people—found relief in depicting.²⁰ Such had been Rome herself in the times of her poverty and ignorance. Such, finally, has that rustic nation shown herself to this day—so vaunted for her courage, which adversity could not overthrow, and for her faithfulness, which example could not corrupt.²¹

It is not out of stupidity that these people have preferred other forms of exercise to those of the mind. They were not unaware of the fact that in other lands idle men spent their lives debating about the sovereign good, about vice and about virtue, and that arrogant reasoners, bestowing on themselves the highest praises, grouped other peoples under the contemptuous name of barbarians. However, they considered their mores and learned to disdain their teaching.²²

Could I forget that it was in the very bosom of Greece that there was seen to arise that city as famous for her happy ignorance as for the wisdom of her laws, that republic of demigods rather than men, so superior to humanity did their virtues seem? O Sparta! Eternal shame to a vain doctrine! While the vices, led by the fine arts, intruded themselves together into Athens, while {11} a tyrant there gathered so carefully the works of the prince of poets,²³ you drove out from your walls the arts and artists, the sciences and scientists.

The event confirmed this difference. Athens became the abode of civility and good taste, the country of orators and philosophy. The elegance of her buildings paralleled that of the language. Marble and canvas, animated by the hands of the most capable masters, were to be seen everywhere. From Athens came those astonishing works that will serve as models in every corrupt age. The picture of Lacedaemon is less brilliant. “There,” said the other peoples, “men are born virtuous, and the very air of the country seems to inspire virtue.” Nothing of her inhabitants is left to us except the memory of their heroic actions. Are such monuments worth less to us than the curious marbles that Athens has left us?

Some wise men, it is true, had resisted the general torrent and protected themselves from vice in the abode of the Muses. But listen to the judgment that the first and unhappiest of them made of the learned men and artists of his time. “I have,” he says, “examined the poets, and I view them as people whose talent makes an impression on them and on others who claim to be wise, who are taken to be such, and who are nothing of the sort.

“From poets,” continues Socrates, “I moved on to artists.²⁴ No one knew less about the arts than I; no one was more convinced that artists possessed some especially fine secrets. Still, I perceived that their condition is no better than that of the poets and that they are both laboring under the same prejudice. Because the most skillful among them excel in their specialty, they view themselves as the wisest of men. To my way of thinking, this presumption has completely tarnished their knowledge. From this it follows that, as I put myself in the place of the oracle and ask myself whether I would prefer to be what I am or what they are, to know what they have learned or to know that I know nothing, I answered myself and God: I want to remain what I am.

“We do not know—neither the sophists, nor the poets, nor the orators, nor the artists, nor I—what is the true, the good, and the beautiful. But there is this difference between us: that although these people know nothing, they all believe they know something. I, however, if I know nothing, at least am not in doubt about it. Thus all that superiority in wisdom accorded me by the oracle reduces to being convinced that I am ignorant of what I do not know.”²⁵

Here then is the wisest of men in the judgment of the gods and the most learned of Athenians in the opinion of all Greece, Socrates, speaking in praise of ignorance! Does anyone believe that, were he to be reborn among us, our {12} learned men and our artists would make him change his mind? No, gentlemen, this just man would continue to hold our vain sciences in contempt. He would not aid in the enlargement of that mass of books that inundate us from every quarter; and the only precept he would leave is the one left to his disciples and to our descendants: the example and the memory of his virtue. Thus is it noble to teach men!

Socrates had begun in Athens, Cato²⁶ the Elder continued in Rome to rail against those artful and subtle Greeks who seduced the virtue and enervated the courage of his fellow citizens. But the sciences, the arts, and dialectic prevailed once again. Rome was filled with philosophers and orators; military discipline was neglected, agriculture scorned, sects embraced, and the homeland forgotten. The sacred names of liberty, disinterestedness, obedience to the laws were replaced by the names of Epicurus, Zeno, Arcesilaus.²⁷ “Ever since learned men have begun to appear in our midst,” their own philosophers said, “good men have vanished.” Until then the Romans had been content to practice virtue; all was lost when they began to study it.

O Fabricius!²⁸ What would your great soul have thought if, had it been your misfortune to be returned to life, you had seen the pompous countenance of that Rome saved by your arm and honored more by your good name than by all her conquests? “Gods!” you would have said, “what has become of those thatched roofs and those rustic hearths where moderation and virtue once dwelt? What fatal splendor has followed upon Roman simplicity? What is this strange speech? What are these effeminate mores? What is the meaning of these statues, these paintings, these buildings? Fools, what have you done? You, the masters of nations, have you made yourselves the slaves of the frivolous men you conquered? Do rhetoricians govern you? Was it to enrich architects, painters, sculptors, and actors that you soaked Greece and Asia with your blood? Are the spoils of Carthage the prey of a flute player?²⁹ Romans make haste to tear down these amphitheaters, shatter these marbles, burn these paintings, drive out these slaves who subjugate you and whose fatal arts corrupt you. Let others achieve notoriety by vain talents; the only talent worthy of Rome is that of conquering the world and making virtue reign in {13} it. When Cineas³⁰ took our Senate for an assembly of kings, he was dazzled neither by vain pomp nor by studied elegance. There he did not hear that frivolous eloquence, the focus of study and delight of futile men. What then did Cineas see that was so majestic? O citizens! He saw a sight that neither your riches nor all your arts could ever display, the most beautiful sight ever to have appeared under the heavens: the assembly of two hundred virtuous men worthy of commanding in Rome and of governing the earth.”

But let us leap over the distance of place and time and see what has happened in our countries and before our eyes; or rather, let us set aside odious pictures that offend our delicate sensibilities and spare ourselves the trouble of repeating the same things under different names. It was not in vain that I summoned the shade of Fabricius; and what did I make that great man say that I could not have placed in the mouth of Louis XII or Henry IV? Among us, it is true. Socrates would not have drunk the hemlock; but he would have drunk from a cup more bitter still: the insulting ridicule and scorn that are a hundred times worse than death. That is how luxury, dissolution, and slavery have at all times been the punishment for the arrogant efforts that we have made to leave the happy ignorance where eternal wisdom had placed us. The heavy veil with which she had covered all her operations seemed to give us sufficient warning that she had not destined us for vain inquiries. But is there even one of her lessons from which we have learned to profit or that we have neglected with impunity? Peoples, know then once and for all that nature wanted to protect you from science just as a mother wrests a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child, that all the secrets she hides from you are so many evils from which she is protecting you, and that the difficulty you find in teaching yourselves is not the least of her kindnesses. Men are perverse; they would be even worse if they had had the misfortune of being born learned.

How humiliating are these reflections for humanity! How mortified our pride must be! What! Could probity be the daughter of ignorance? Science and virtue incompatible? What consequences might not be drawn from these prejudices? But to reconcile these apparent points of conflict, one need merely examine at close range the vanity and the emptiness of those proud titles that overpower us and that we so gratuitously bestow upon human knowledge. Let us then consider the sciences and the arts in themselves; let us see what must result from their progress; and let us no longer hesitate to be in agreement on all the points where our reasoning will be found to be in accord with historical inductions.

{14} PART TWO

It was an ancient tradition, passed from Egypt to Greece, that a god who was antagonistic toward the tranquility of men was the inventor of the sciences.³¹ What opinion then must have been held about them by the Egyptians themselves, among whom the sciences were born? They saw at close quarters the sources that had produced them. Indeed, whether one leafs through the annals of the world or supplements uncertain chronicles with philosophical inquiries, one will not find an origin for human knowledge corresponding to the idea that one wants to form of it. Astronomy was born of superstition, eloquence of ambition, hatred, flattery, lying; geometry of avarice; physics of vain curiosity; all of them, even moral philosophy, of human pride. Thus the sciences and the arts owe their birth to our vices; we would be less in doubt about their advantages if they owed it to our virtues.

The defect of their origin is only too clearly called to mind for us in their objects. What would we do with the arts without the luxury that feeds them? What purposes would jurisprudence serve without the injustices of men? What would history become if there were no tyrants, no wars, no conspirators? In a word, who would want to spend his life in fruitless speculations if each person, consulting only the duties of man and the needs of nature, had time for nothing but the homeland, the unfortunate, and his friends? Are we destined then to die fastened to the edge of the well where truth has retreated?³² This reflection alone should block from the start any man who would seriously seek to teach himself through the study of philosophy.

What dangers! What false pathways in the investigation of the sciences! How many errors, a thousand times more dangerous than the truth is useful, must be endured in order to reach it? The disadvantage is apparent, for falsity is susceptible to an infinity of combinations; but truth has but one mode of being. Besides, who seeks it sincerely? Even with the best will, by what marks is one sure of recognizing it? In this crowd of different opinions, what will be our criterion for judging it properly.³³ And, what is most difficult, {15} if perchance we finally find it, who among us will know how to make good use of it?

If our sciences are vain in the objects they have in view, they are even more dangerous in the effects they produce. Born in idleness, they nourish it in turn; and the irreparable loss of time is the first injury they necessarily cause society. In politics, as in moral philosophy, it is a great evil not to do good, and every useless citizen may be viewed as a pernicious man. Answer me, then, illustrious philosophers, you thanks to whom we know the ratios in which bodies attract one another in a vacuum; the relationships of areas covered in equal periods of time in the revolutions of the planets; what curves have conjugate points, which have points of inflection, and which have cusps; how man sees everything in God; how the soul and the body are in harmony with one another, like two clocks, without communicating; what heavenly bodies can be inhabited; what insects reproduce in some extraordinary manner?³⁴ Answer me, I say, you from whom we have received so much sublime knowledge; if you had never taught us any of these things, would we therefore have been any less numerous, less well governed, less formidable, less flourishing or more perverse? Reconsider, then, the importance of your productions; and if the labors of the most enlightened of our learned men and our best citizens obtain for us so little that is useful, tell us what we should think about that crowd of obscure writers and idle men of letters who to no purpose devour the substance of the state.

What did I say? Idle? Would to God they really were! Mores would then be healthier and society would be more peaceful. But these vain and futile declaimers go off in every direction, armed with their deadly paradoxes, undermining the foundations of faith and annihilating virtue. They smile contemptuously at such old-fashioned words as homeland and religion and dedicate their talents and their philosophy to destroying and degrading all that is sacred among men. Not that at bottom they hate either virtue or our dogmas; they are enemies of public opinion, and to bring them back to the feet of the altars it would be enough to consign them among the atheists. O fury to gain distinction, of what are you not capable?

The misuse of time is a great evil. Other evils that are even worse follow after letters and the arts. Luxury, born like them of idleness and men’s vanity, is one such. Luxury seldom thrives without the sciences and the arts, and they never thrive without it. I know that our philosophy, ever fecund with singular maxims, claims, contrary to the experience of all centuries, {16} that luxury causes the splendor of states.³⁵ But after having forgotten the need for sumptuary laws, will it still dare deny that good mores are essential to the continuance of empires and that luxury is diametrically opposed to good mores? Granted luxury is a sure sign of wealth; it even serves, if you will, to increase wealth. What conclusion must we draw from this paradox so worthy of being born in our times; and what will become of virtue when one must become wealthy at any cost? Ancient politicians spoke incessantly about mores and virtue; ours speak only of commerce and money. One will tell you that in a given country a man is worth the price he would sell for in Algiers; another, following this calculation, will find some countries where a man is worth nothing and others where he is worth less than nothing. They value men the way they would herds of cattle. According to them, a man is worth no more to the state than what he consumes. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. So guess which of these two republics, Sparta and Sybaris,³⁶ was subjugated by a handful of peasants and which caused Asia to tremble.

The monarchy of Cyrus³⁷ was conquered with thirty thousand men by a prince who was poorer than the humblest of Persian satraps; and the Scythians, the most miserable of all peoples, resisted the most powerful monarchs in the universe. Two famous republics competed for world domination. One was very rich and the other had nothing, and it was the latter that destroyed the former. The Roman Empire, in turn, after having swallowed up all the wealth of the universe, fell prey to men who did not even know what wealth was. The Franks conquered the Gauls, the Saxons conquered England—with no other treasures than their bravery and their poverty. A band of poor mountaineers, all of whose greed was limited to a few sheepskins, after having tamed Austrian arrogance, crushed that opulent and formidable house of Burgundy that caused the potentates of Europe to tremble. Finally, all the power and wisdom of Charles V’s heir, supported by all the treasures of the Indies, were beaten by a handful of herring fishers.³⁸ Let our politicians deign to suspend their calculations in order to reflect on these examples, and let them learn for once that with money one has everything but mores and citizens.

{17} Precisely what, then, is at issue in this question of luxury? To know whether it is more important for empires to be brilliant and fleeting or virtuous and long lasting. I say brilliant, but by what luster? The taste for ostentation is hardly ever combined in the same souls with the taste for honesty. No, it is not possible for minds degraded by a multitude of futile needs ever to rise to anything great; and even if they had the strength, they would lack the courage.

Every artist wants to be applauded. The praises of his contemporaries are the most precious part of his reward. What then will he do to obtain praise if he has the misfortune to be born among a people and at a time when learned men, having become fashionable, have placed a frivolous youth in a position to set the tone; when men have sacrificed their taste to the tyrants of their liberty;³⁹ when, because one of the sexes dares approve only what is a match for the other’s pusillanimity, masterpieces of dramatic poetry are dropped and harmonic prodigies rejected? What will he do, gentlemen? He will lower his genius to the level of his century and will prefer to compose popular works that are admired during his lifetime instead of marvels that would not be admired until long after his death. Tell us, famed Arouet,⁴⁰ how many manly and strong beauties you have sacrificed to our false delicacy, and how many great things has the spirit of gallantry, so fertile in small things, cost you?

In this way the dissolution of mores, a necessary consequence of luxury, leads in turn to the corruption of taste. If perchance there is, among men of extraordinary talents, someone who has firmness of soul and who refuses to yield to the genius of his century and to degrade himself by childish productions, woe to him! He will die in poverty and oblivion. Would that I were making a prediction and not reporting an experience! Carle, Pierre;⁴¹ the moment has come when that brush destined to enhance the majesty of our temples with sublime and saintly images will either fall from your hands or {18} be prostituted to embellish carriage panels with lascivious pictures. And you, rival of the likes of Praxiteles and Phidias,⁴² you whose chisel the ancients would have employed to make them gods capable of excusing their idolatry in our eyes; inimitable Pigalle,⁴³ either your hand will be determined to rough out the belly of a grotesque or it will have to remain idle.

One cannot reflect on mores without taking delight in recalling the image of the simplicity of the earliest times. It is a beautiful shore, adorned by the hands of nature alone, toward which one continually turns one’s eyes and from which one regretfully feels oneself moving away. When innocent and virtuous men wanted to have the gods as witnesses of their actions, they lived together in the same huts. But having soon become wicked, they wearied of these inconvenient spectators and banished them to magnificent temples. Finally, they chased them from the temples in order to take up residence in them themselves, or at least the temples of the gods were no longer distinguishable from the homes of the citizens. That period was the height of depravity, and vices were never given freer rein than when they were, so to speak, seen standing on columns of marble and carved on Corinthian capitals at the entrance to the palaces of the great.

While the conveniences of life increase, the arts are perfected and luxury spreads, true courage is enervated, military virtues disappear, and this too is the work of the sciences and of all those arts that are practiced in the darkness of the study. When the Goths ravaged Greece, all of the libraries were saved from fire only because of the opinion, spread by one of them, that the enemy should be left the furnishings so well suited to distracting them from military exercise and to amusing them with idle and sedentary occupations. Charles VIII found himself master of Tuscany and the kingdom of Naples practically without having drawn his sword, and his entire court attributed this unexpected ease to the fact that the princes and the nobility of Italy had a good time becoming ingenious and learned more than they exerted themselves trying to become vigorous and warlike. In fact, says the sensible man who reports these two cases,⁴⁴ all examples teach us that in this martial polity and in all those that resemble it, the study of the sciences is much more apt to soften and enervate courage than to strengthen and enliven it.

The Romans admitted that military virtue died out among them in so far as they had begun to become connoisseurs of paintings, engravings, goldsmiths’ vessels, and to cultivate the fine arts. And, as if that famous country were destined to serve unceasingly as an example to other peoples, the rise of the Medici and the revival of letters brought down once again and perhaps forever {19} that warlike reputation that Italy seemed to have recovered a few centuries ago. The ancient republics of Greece, with that wisdom that radiated through most of their institutions, had forbidden their citizens to engage in all those tranquil and sedentary professions that, by weighing down and corrupting the body, soon enervate the vigor of the soul. Indeed, with what eye does one think that men who are crushed by the smallest need and stopped cold by the least pain could face hunger, thirst, periods of fatigue, dangers, and death? With what courage will soldiers stand up under excessive labors to which they are unaccustomed? With what fervor will they go on forced marches under officers who lack even the strength to travel on horseback? Let no one raise as an objection against me the renowned valor of all those modern warriors who are so scientifically disciplined. People brag to me of their bravery on a day of battle, but they do not tell me how they handle overwork, how they withstand the harshness of the seasons and the inclemency of the weather. All that is needed is a bit of sunshine or snow, a lack of a few superfluities, to melt and destroy the best of our armies in a few days. Intrepid warriors, suffer for once the truth you so rarely hear: you are brave. I know: you would have triumphed with Hannibal at Cannae and at Trasimene; with you Caesar would have crossed the Rubicon and enslaved his country; but it was not with you that the former would have crossed the Alps, and the latter would have vanquished your ancestors.

Battles do not always make for success in war, and for generals there is an art superior to that of winning battles. A man who runs intrepidly into the line of fire is still a very bad officer. Even in a soldier, a little more strength and vigor would perhaps be more necessary than that sort of bravery, which does not protect him from death; and what difference does it make to the state whether its troops die from fever and cold or by the enemy’s sword?

If the cultivation of the sciences is harmful to warlike qualities, it is even more so to moral qualities. From our earliest years a foolish education adorns our mind and corrupts our judgment. Everywhere I see immense establishments where youths are brought up at great expense to learn everything but their duties. Your children will not know their own language but will speak others that are nowhere in use.⁴⁵ They will know how to compose verses they will scarcely be capable of comprehending. Without knowing how to separate error from truth, they will possess the art of making them unrecognizable to others by means of specious arguments. But they will not know the meaning of the words magnanimity, fair-mindedness, temperance, humanity, courage. That sweet name homeland will never strike their ear; and if they hear God spoken of at all, it will be less to be in awe of him than to be in fear of him.⁴⁶ I would just as soon, said a wise man, my pupil had passed time on the tennis court; at least his body would have been more fit because of it. I {20} know that children need to be kept occupied and that, for them, idleness is the greatest danger to fear. What then should they learn? That is certainly a fine question! Let them learn what they ought to do when they are men⁴⁷ and not what they ought to forget.

Our gardens are decorated with statues and our galleries with pictures. What would you think these masterpieces of art, exhibited for public admiration, represent? The defenders of the homeland? Or those even greater men who have enriched it with their virtues? No. They are images of all the aberrations of the heart and reason, carefully drawn from ancient mythology and presented at an early age to the curiosity of our children, doubtless so that they may have models of bad actions before their eyes even before they know how to read.

Where do all these abuses come from, if not from the fatal inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the degradation of virtues?⁴⁸ That is the most evident effect of all our studies and the most dangerous of all their consequences. One no longer asks whether a man has {21} integrity, but whether he has talents; not whether a book is useful, but whether it is well written. Rewards are showered upon the wit, and virtue is left without honors. There are a thousand prizes for fine discourses, none for fine actions. Meanwhile, would someone tell me whether the glory attached to the best of discourses that will be crowned in this academy is comparable to the merit of having established the prize?

The wise man does not chase after fortune, but he is not insensitive to glory; and he sees it so ill distributed that his virtue, which a little emulation would have enlivened and made advantageous to society, languishes and dies out in misery and oblivion. This is what, in the long run, the preference for congenial talents over useful ones must everywhere produce, and what experience since the revival of the sciences and the arts has only too well confirmed. We have physicists, geometers, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, painters; we no longer have citizens. Or if there still are some left to us, dispersed in our abandoned countryside, they perish there indigent and despised. Such is the state to which those who give us bread and our children milk are reduced; such are the values they get from us.

Nevertheless, I confess that the evil is not as great as it could have become. By placing health-restoring herbs next to various harmful plants, and by placing the remedy for their bites in the flesh of various injurious animals, eternal foresight has taught sovereigns, who are its ministers, to imitate its wisdom. By following this example, that great monarch, whose glory will only acquire a new luster from one age to another, drew from the very bosom of the sciences and the arts sources of a thousand disorders, those famed societies which are charged simultaneously with the dangerous trust of human knowledge and the sacred trust of mores, by the attention they pay to maintaining them in all their purity, and to requiring it in the members they admit.⁴⁹

These wise institutions, strengthened by his august successor and imitated by all the kings of Europe, will at least serve as a restraint on men of letters, who, since they all aspire to the honor of being admitted to the academies, will keep watch over themselves and try to make themselves worthy by means of useful works and irreproachable mores. Those among these organizations that will select, for the prize competitions honoring literary merit, subjects suitable for reviving the love of virtue in the hearts of citizens will show that such love reigns among them and will give the people that very rare and sweet pleasure of seeing learned societies devote themselves to spreading throughout mankind not only congenial enlightenment but also salutary teachings.

Do not therefore raise an objection against me that for me is merely a new proof. So many precautions show all too well the necessity for taking them, and no one seeks remedies for nonexistent evils. Why is it inevitable that these, by their inadequacy, should prove to be just like ordinary remedies? {22} So many establishments brought into being for the benefit of the learned are, after all, all the more capable of causing deception in regard to the objects of the sciences and of turning minds toward their cultivation. To judge from the precautions that have been taken, it would seem that there are too many field hands and that a shortage of philosophers is feared. I have no desire to venture here a comparison between agriculture and philosophy; it would not be tolerated. I will ask merely, what is philosophy? What do the writings of the best-known philosophers contain? What are the lessons of these friends of wisdom? To listen to them, would one not take them for a troop of charlatans, each crying from his own place on a public square, “Come to me; I alone do not deceive?” One claims there are no bodies and that everything is appearance; another that there is no substance but matter, nor any God but the world. This one proposes that there are neither virtues nor vices and that moral good and evil are chimeras; that one that men are wolves and can devour one another with a clear conscience.⁵⁰ O great philosophers! Why do you not save these useful lessons for your friends and for your children? You would soon reap the reward for them, and we would have no fear of finding one of your followers among our own.

These then are the wonderful men on whom the esteem of their contemporaries was squandered during their lifetimes and who alone were judged worthy of immortality after their deaths! These are the wise maxims that we have received from them and that we will transmit to our descendants from generation to generation. Paganism was given over to all the aberrations of human reason, but has it left to posterity anything comparable to the shameful monuments prepared for it by the printing press under the reign of the Gospel? The impious writings of the likes of Leucippus and Diagoras⁵¹ perished with them. The art of immortalizing the extravagances of the human mind had not yet been invented. But thanks to typography⁵² and the use we {23} make of it, the dangerous reveries of the likes of Hobbes and Spinoza⁵³ will remain forever. Go, famed writings of which the ignorance and rusticity of our forefathers would have been incapable. Go among our descendants in company with those even more dangerous works that reek of the corruption of the mores of our century; and together send on to future centuries a faithful history of the progress and advantages of our sciences and our arts. If they read you, you will not leave them in any doubt about the question we are dealing with today; and unless they are more foolish than we, they will raise their hands to heaven and will say with bitterness of heart, “Almighty God, you who hold minds in your hands, deliver us from the enlightenment and the deadly arts of our fathers, and give back to us ignorance, innocence, and poverty—the only goods that can bring about our happiness and that are precious in your sight.”

But if the progress of the sciences and the arts has added nothing to our genuine felicity, if it has corrupted our mores, and if the corruption of mores has damaged the purity of taste, what are we to think of that crowd of elementary-level writers who have removed from the temple of the Muses the difficulties that protected its approach and that nature had spread out before it as a test of strength for those who might be tempted to know? While it would be desirable for all those who could not go far in a career in letters to be deterred from the outset and become involved with arts useful to society, what are we to think of those compilers of works who have indiscreetly broken down the door of the sciences and ushered into their sanctuary a populace unworthy of approaching it? Someone who will be a bad versifier or an inferior geometer all his life might perhaps have become a great cloth maker. Those whom nature destined to be her disciples had no need of teachers. The likes of Verulam, Descartes, Newton,⁵⁴ these tutors of mankind had {24} none themselves. Indeed, what guides would have led them as far as their own vast genius has carried them? Ordinary teachers could only have constricted their understanding by confining it to the narrow capacity of their own. The very first obstacles they encountered taught them to work hard and to exert themselves in order to cover the immense area they traversed. If a few men must be permitted to devote themselves to the study of the sciences and the arts, it should only be those who feel the strength to venture forth alone in their footsteps and to overtake them. It is for this small number to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind. But if we want nothing to be beyond their genius, nothing must be beyond their hopes. That is the only encouragement they need. The soul imperceptibly proportions itself to the objects that occupy it, and it is great events that make great men. The prince of eloquence was consul of Rome, and perhaps the greatest of philosophers, chancellor of England.⁵⁵ Does anyone believe that if the one had merely occupied a chair at some university and the other had obtained only a modest pension from an academy, does anyone, say, believe that their works would not have felt the effects of their condition? Therefore let kings not disdain to admit into their councils the men most capable of counseling them well. Let them renounce the old prejudice invented by the pride of the great, that the art of leading peoples is more difficult than that of enlightening them, as if it were easier to induce men to act well of their own accord than to compel them to do it by force. May learned men of the first rank find honorable asylum in their courts. May they obtain the only recompense worthy of them: that of contributing by their influence to the happiness of the peoples to whom they have taught wisdom. Only then will we see what can be done by virtue, science, and authority, enlivened by a noble emulation and working in concert for the felicity of mankind. But as long as power is alone on one side, with enlightenment and wisdom alone on the other, learned men will rarely think about great things, princes will even more rarely perform noble deeds, and peoples will continue to be vile, corrupt, and unhappy.

As for us—ordinary men to whom heaven has not distributed such great talents and whom it does not destine for so much glory—let us remain in our obscurity. Let us not chase after a reputation that would escape us and that, in the present state of things, would never repay us what it would have cost us, even if we had all the qualifications to obtain it. What good is it to seek our happiness in the opinion of another if we can find it in ourselves? Let us leave to others the care of instructing peoples in their duties and confine ourselves to fulfilling our own duties well. We have no need to know more than this.

{25} O virtue! Sublime science of simple souls, are there so many difficulties and so much preparation necessary in order to know you? Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and is it not enough, in order to learn your laws, to commune with oneself and, in the silence of the passions, to listen to the voice of one’s conscience? That is the true philosophy. Let us know how to be satisfied with it. And without envying the glory of those famous men who are immortalized in the republic of letters, let us try to place between them and ourselves that glorious distinction observed long ago between two great peoples: that the one knew how to speak well, the other how to act well.⁵⁶

___________________________

¹ [The Academy of Dijon was founded by Hector-Bernard Pouffier, dean of the Parliament of Bourgogne. In the October 1749 issue of Mercure de France, the academy announced the topic of its 1750 essay competition: whether the restoration of the sciences and the arts contributed to the purification of mores. The prize consisted of a gold medallion.]

² [Throughout this translation, moeurs is rendered as “mores.” No one word can capture the range of meanings of moeurs, which can include “morals” and “culture” (see Introduction, p. xxxiii, at “Another key term is moeurs”), but the consistent rendering here has the added advantage of drawing the reader’s attention to the original French word behind the translation.]

³ [Tristia, bk. 5, 10:37. Rousseau quotes the Latin: “Barbarus hic ego sum quia non intelligor illis.”]

⁴ [This foreword did not appear in print until 1781.]

⁵ [The reference is to an edition of Rousseau’s collected works that the author himself was preparing for publication.]

⁶ [The terms sciences and arts are translated throughout as “sciences” and “arts,” but the French science includes almost all forms of knowledge, and the French art refers to specialized skills as well as what we call “the arts.”]

⁷ [Founded in 1576 by Henry, third Duke of Guise, the Holy League was an organization of Catholics dedicated to the suppression of French Protestantism.]

⁸ [Horace, On the Art of Poetry, line 25. Rousseau here quotes the Latin.]

⁹ [Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) was the former capital of the Byzantine Empire. It was captured by Sultan Mohammed II and the Turks in 1453.]

¹⁰ [This sentence may be one of the two passages added by Rousseau after his Discourse was awarded the prize. See the headnote.]

¹¹ Princes always view with pleasure the spread, among their subjects, of the taste for pleasant arts and luxuries as long as they do not result in the exporting of money. For, in addition to nurturing in them that pettiness of soul so appropriate to servitude, they know very well that all the needs the populace imposes on itself are so many chains that burden it. Alexander, wishing to keep the Ichthyophagi in a state of dependency, forced them to renounce fishing and eat foods common to other peoples. And the savages of America, who go totally naked and who live off the product of their hunting, have never been tamed. Indeed, what yoke could be imposed upon men who need nothing?

¹² [In ancient Greece athletes competed in the nude.]

¹³ “I love,” says Montaigne, “to debate and discuss, but only with a few men and for my own sake. For I find it an especially unworthy profession for a man of honor to serve as a spectacle to the great and shamelessly parade one’s mind and one’s prattling.” It is the profession of all our wits, save one. [This citation is from Montaigne’s “On the Art of Discussion,” Essays, bk. 3, ch. 8. The exception is presumably Diderot, who took charge of the publication of the Discourse.]

¹⁴ [A fairly common name among Egyptian pharaohs. The Sesostris in question here seems to be legendary.]

¹⁵ [Cambyses, king of Persia, conquered Egypt in 525 BC.]

¹⁶ [Quintus Ennius (239–c. 170 BC) was an early Latin poet revered as the father of Roman poetry. Publius Terentius Afer (c. 190–c. 159 BC) was a famous Roman playwright.]

¹⁷ [Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BC–AD 18) was a Roman writer, among whose works were Metamorphoses and Ars Amatoria (see also note 3). Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84–c. 54 BC) is generally considered one of the greatest of the lyric poets of ancient Rome. Marcus Valerius Martialis (c. AD 40–c. 104) was a Roman satirist and epigrammatist. All three writers are perhaps best known for their graphically erotic poetry.]

¹⁸ [Tacitus, in his Annals, bk. 16, ch. 18, states that this title was given to Petronius (d. AD 66), a satirist and courtier to the emperor Nero. An indolent and profligate lover of comfort and luxury, Petronius enjoyed a reputation as a man of elegant and refined taste. In recognition of these traits, Petronius was made the “Arbiter of Good Taste,” responsible for orchestrating the emperor’s entertainment.]

¹⁹ [An apparent reference to Xenophon’s (430–354 BC) Education of Cyrus.]

²⁰ [A reference to Tacitus’ Germania.]

²¹ I dare not speak of those happy nations that do not know even by name the vices that we have so much trouble repressing, those savages in America whose simple and natural polity Montaigne unhesitatingly prefers not only to Plato’s Laws but even to everything philosophy could ever imagine as the most perfect for the government of peoples. He cites a number of examples that are striking for someone who would know how to admire them. “What!” he says, “why they don’t wear pants!” [This citation is from Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals,” Essays, bk. 1, ch. 31. The “rustic nation” refers to the Swiss.]

²² Will someone honestly tell me what opinion the Athenians themselves must have held regarding eloquence, when they were so fastidious about banning it from that upright tribunal whose judgments the gods themselves did not appeal? What did the Romans think of medicine, when they banished it from their republic? And when a remnant of humanity led the Spanish to forbid their lawyers to enter America, what idea must they have had of jurisprudence? Could it not be said that they believed that by this single act they had made reparation for all the evils they had brought upon those unfortunate Indians?

²³ [Pisistratus (c. 605–527 BC) was said to have directed the collection, transcription, and organization of the works of Homer.]

²⁴ [Rousseau uses the words artistes and arts, translated here for consistency as “artists” and “arts,” though modern translations of Plato have “artisans” and “crafts.”]

²⁵ [Rousseau is paraphrasing Plato’s Apology, 22a–23b.]

²⁶ [Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato the Elder, 234–149 BC) was a Roman general and statesman renowned for his devotion to the old Roman ideals of simplicity, honesty, courage, loyalty, and steadfastness.]

²⁷ [Epicurus (c. 341–270 BC) was the founder of the Epicurean school of philosophy. Zeno of Citium (c. 336–264 BC) was the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy. Arcesilaus (c. 316–241 BC) was a figure in the Middle Academy who played a pivotal role in the transmission and development of philosophical skepticism.]

²⁸ [Gaius Fabricius Luscinus (d. 250 BC) was a Roman general and statesman renowned for his uncomplicated integrity and dignity.]

²⁹ [The flute player is the emperor Nero.]

³⁰ [Cineas, a Thessalian, was an ambassador of King Pyrrhus. Reputed to be possessed of good sense, he was also the student of Demosthenes who most reminded people of his teacher.]

³¹ The allegory of the fable of Prometheus is easy to recognize; and it does not appear that the Greeks who nailed him to the Caucasus thought any more favorably of him than the Egyptians did of their god Theuth. “The satyr,” says an ancient fable, “wanted to kiss and embrace fire the first time he saw it. But Prometheus cried out to him, ‘Satyr, you will mourn the loss of the beard on your chin, for it burns when touched.’” It is the subject of the frontispiece.

³² [The suggestion that truth is as unobtainable as it would be if it had been thrown into a well originates with Democritus (c. 460–c. 370 BC).]

³³ The less one knows, the more one believes one knows. Did the Peripatetics doubt anything? Did Descartes not construct the universe with cubes and vortices? And is there in Europe even today a physicist, however humble, who does not boldly explain the profound mystery of electricity, which will perhaps forever be the despair of true philosophers? [Peripatetics were followers of the philosophy of Aristotle. René Descartes (1596–1650), French mathematician and philosopher, is often cited as “the father of modern philosophy.” He is the author of the Discourse on Method, Meditations on First Philosophy, and Principles of Philosophy.]

³⁴ [In the eighteenth century, “philosophy” included natural philosophy, or what we call “science.” The philosophers Rousseau refers to here include Newton, Kepler, Malebranche, Leibniz, Fontenelle, and Réaumur.]

³⁵ [The most important contemporary text in defense of luxury was Voltaire’s Le Mondain (1736). Rousseau refers later to Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714), which he may have already read when writing the first Discourse.]

³⁶ [Sybaris was a city in Magna Graecia (now southern Italy), founded in 770 BC. It was a wealthy city whose citizens were reputed to have pursued lives of pleasure and luxury—“sybaritic” pastimes. The city was destroyed in 510 BC. Lacedaemonians is another word for Spartans. Sparta, which emphasized military discipline and frugality, repeatedly defeated the Persians during the Greco-Persian wars (499–449 BC).]

³⁷ [Cyrus the Great (d. 529 BC), king of Persia and founder of the Achaemenian dynasty and the Persian Empire. The military defeat mentioned here did not involve Cyrus himself but one of his successors.]

³⁸ [By the Dutch in their war for independence from Spain, 1568–1648.]

³⁹ I am very far from thinking that this ascendancy of women is itself an evil. It is a gift bestowed on them by nature for the happiness of mankind. Better directed, it could produce as much good as today it does harm. We are not sufficiently aware of the advantages that would come to pass in society if a better education were given to that half of mankind that governs the other. Men will always be what is pleasing to women. Thus if you want men to become great and virtuous, teach women what greatness of soul and virtue are. The reflections afforded by this subject and made long ago by Plato richly deserve a better development by a pen worthy of writing in the tradition of such a teacher and of defending so great a cause.

⁴⁰ [François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694–l778), better known simply as Voltaire, was a French poet, dramatist, essayist, historian, philosopher, and scientist, and the dominant figure in French literary culture of the day. Since he had invented for himself the title “de Voltaire” in 1718, it was a hostile gesture on Rousseau’s part to demote him once again to the ranks of commoners.]

⁴¹ [Charles-André (Carle) Vanloo (1705–1765) and Jean-Baptiste-Marie Pierre (1713–1789) enjoyed international reputations as painters.]

⁴² [Praxiteles (fl. c. 370–300 BC) and Phidias (c. 500–c. 432 BC) are among the most famous of ancient Greek sculptors.]

⁴³ [Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714–1785) was a French sculptor who achieved fame through a life of hardship and sacrifice.]

⁴⁴ [Montaigne, Essays, bk. 1, ch. 24.]

⁴⁵ [Latin and Greek.]

⁴⁶ Pens. Philosoph. [The reference is to Diderot, Pensées philosophiques, no. 8.]

⁴⁷ Such was the education of the Spartans according to the greatest of their kings. It is, says Montaigne [Essays, bk. 1, ch. 24], well worth considering that in that excellent administration of Lycurgus (in truth monstrously perfect), which was preoccupied with the diet of children, as if this were its chief responsibility, and although it was in the very home of the Muses [i.e., Mount Helicon], so little mention was made of the content of their education, as if those great-souled youths, disdaining every other yoke, required only the teachers of valor, prudence, and justice, instead of our teachers of science.

Let us now see how the same author speaks of the ancient Persians. Plato, he says, relates that the eldest son of their royal line was brought up as follows. After his birth he was given over not to women but to eunuchs who, because of their virtue, had the greatest influence with the king. They took charge of making his body fair and healthy, and after seven years they taught him to ride and hunt. When he turned fourteen, they placed him in the hands of four people: the most wise, the most just, the most temperate, the most valiant in the nation. The first taught him religion; the second always to be truthful; the third to conquer his appetites; the fourth to fear nothing. All, I would add, to make him good, none to make him learned.

Astyages, in Xenophon, asks Cyrus for an account of his last lesson. It was, he says, that in our school a large boy who had a small tunic gave it to one of his companions who was smaller and took from him his tunic, which was larger. When our tutor made me the judge of this dispute, I judged that things should be allowed to stand as they were, and that they both seemed to be better taken care of in this matter. Whereupon he chastised me for having done wrong, for I had stopped to consider seemliness, and one ought first to have taken justice into account, which requires that no one be subjected to force in matters pertaining to what belongs to him. And he said that he was punished, just as we are punished in our villages for having forgotten the first aorist of [“I beat”]. My schoolmaster would have to give me a fine harangue in genere demonstrativo, before he persuaded me that his school is as good as that one.

⁴⁸ [This sentence may be the second passage added by Rousseau to his original text.]

⁴⁹ [A reference to the various academies, including the Academy of Sciences, founded by Louis XIV.]

⁵⁰ [Rousseau is referring to Berkeley, Spinoza, Mandeville, and Hobbes.]

⁵¹ [Leucippus (fl. fifth century BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher reputed by Aristotle to have been the inspiration for the atomistic theory associated with Democritus. Diagoras of Melos (fl. fifth century BC) was a Greek poet and philosopher. When Spartan forces overran Melos, he fled to Athens, where he gained a reputation for his outspoken skepticism and atheism. He was an ardent follower of the atomistic philosophy of Democritus.]

⁵² Considering the frightful disorders that the printing press has already caused in Europe, and judging the future by the progress that the evil makes from one day to the next, it is easy to foresee that sovereigns will not delay in taking as many pains to banish this terrible art from their states as they took to establish it in them. The Sultan Achmed, yielding to the importunities of some alleged men of taste, had consented to establish a printing press in Constantinople. But the press had hardly begun operations when it had to be destroyed and the equipment thrown into a well. It is said that the Caliph Omar, when asked what ought to be done with the library of Alexandria, answered in these terms: “If the books in this library contain things opposed to the Koran, they are bad and should be burned. If they contain nothing but the doctrine of the Koran, burn them anyway; they are superfluous.” Our learned men have cited this reasoning as the height of absurdity. Nevertheless, imagine Gregory the Great in place of Omar and the Gospel in place of the Koran. The library would still have been burned, and this perhaps would be the finest deed in the life of that illustrious pontiff. [Achmed II (1673–1736), Ottoman sultan who ruled from 1703 until 1730, when he was overthrown and later died in prison. Omar (c. 581–644) became caliph in 634 and was assassinated ten years later. He is largely responsible for the early spread of Mohammedanism in the Near East. Pope Gregory I, also known as Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), ruled as pope from 590 to 604. He is best known for his establishment of the supremacy and temporal power of the papacy.]

⁵³ [Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English philosopher who espoused the doctrine of mechanistic materialism. He was the author of De Cive, Leviathan, and De Homine. Baruch (or Benedict) de Spinoza (1632–1677) was a member of the community of Sephardic Jews living in Holland who had fled persecution in Spain and Portugal. His chief writings were the Ethics, On the Improvement of the Understanding, and Theological-Political Treatise.]

⁵⁴ [Francis Bacon (1561–1626), English statesman and philosopher, was created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount of St. Albans in 1621. He is the author of The Advancement of Learning and Novum Organum. Descartes is described in note 33. Isaac Newton (1642–1727), English physicist and philosopher, invented the reflecting telescope and is best known for his formulation of the laws of motion and gravitation. His principal works were Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica and Opticks.]

⁵⁵ [Cicero and Francis Bacon, respectively.]

⁵⁶ [Athens and Sparta, respectively. The Spartans were famously laconic, an adjective from Laconia, their home region.]