{93} Rousseau’s Notes to

Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men

Note i (page 32, “at his discretion”) Herodotus relates that after the murder of the false Smerdis, the seven liberators of Persia being assembled to deliberate on the form of government they would give the state, Otanes was fervently in support of a republic—an opinion all the more extraordinary in the mouth of a satrap since, over and above the claim he could have to the empire, a grandee fears more than death a type of government that forces him to respect men.⁶⁶ Otanes, as may readily be believed, was not listened to; and seeing that things were progressing toward the election of a monarch, he, who wanted neither to obey nor command, voluntarily yielded to the other rivals his right to the crown, asking as his sole compensation that he and his descendants be free and independent. This was granted to him. If Herodotus did not inform us of the restriction that was placed on this privilege, it would be necessary to suppose it; otherwise Otanes, not acknowledging any sort of law and not being accountable to anyone, would have been all powerful in the state and more powerful than the king himself. But there was hardly any likelihood that a man capable of contenting himself, in similar circumstances, with such a privilege was capable of abusing it. In fact, there is no evidence that this right ever caused the least trouble in the kingdom, either from wise Otanes or from any of his descendants.

Note ii (page 39, “that of man”) From the start I rely with confidence on one of those authorities that are respectable for philosophers, because their authority derives from a solid and sublime reason, which philosophers alone know how to find and perceive.

“Whatever interest we may have in knowing ourselves, I do not know whether we do not have a better knowledge of everything that is not us. Provided by nature with organs uniquely destined for our preservation, we use them merely to receive impressions of external things; we seek merely to extend ourselves outward and to exist outside ourselves. Too much taken with multiplying the functions of our senses and with increasing the external range of our being, we rarely make use of that internal sense that reduces us to our true dimensions and that separates us from all that is not us. Nevertheless, this is the sense we must use if we wish to know ourselves. It is the only one by which we can judge ourselves. But how can this sense be activated and given its full range? How can our soul, in which it resides, be rid of all the illusions of our mind? We have lost the habit of using it; it has remained unexercised in the midst of the tumult of our bodily sensations; it has been dried out by the {94} fire of our passions; the heart, the mind, the senses, everything has worked against it.” Hist. Nat., Vol. IV: de la Nat. de l’homme, p. 151.⁶⁷

Note iii (page 47, “on all fours”) The changes that a long-established habit of walking on two feet could have brought about in the conformation of man, the relationships that are still to be observed between his arms and the forelegs of quadrupeds, and the conclusion that may be drawn from their manner of walking could have given rise to doubts about the manner of locomotion that must have been the most natural to us. All children begin by walking on all fours and need our example and our lessons to learn to stand upright. There are even savage nations, such as the Hottentots, who, greatly neglecting their children, allow them to walk on their hands for so long that they then have a great deal of trouble getting them to straighten up. The children of the Caribs of the Antilles do the same thing. There are various examples of quadruped men, and I could cite among others that of the child who was found in 1344 near Hesse, where he had been raised by wolves, and who said afterward at the court of Prince Henry that had the decision been left exclusively to him, he would have preferred to return to the wolves rather than to live among men. He had embraced to such an extent the habit of walking like those animals that wooden boards had to be attached to him to force him to stand upright and maintain his balance on two feet. It was the same with the child who was found in 1694 in the forests of Lithuania and who lived among bears. He did not give, says Mr. Condillac, any sign of reason, walked on his hands and feet, had no language, and formed sounds that bore no resemblance whatever to those of a man. The little savage of Hanover, who was brought to the court of England several years ago, had all sorts of trouble getting himself to walk on two feet. And in 1719, two other savages, who were found in the Pyrenees, ran about the mountains in the manner of quadrupeds. As for the objection one might make that this deprives one of the use of one’s hands from which we derive so many advantages, over and above the fact that the example of monkeys shows that the hand can be used quite well in both ways, this would prove only that man can give his limbs a purpose more useful than the one they have been given by nature, and not that nature has destined man to walk otherwise than it teaches him.

But there are, it seems to me, much better reasons to state in support of the claim that man is a biped. First, if it were shown that he could have originally been formed otherwise than we see him and yet finally become what he is, this would not suffice to conclude that this is how it happened; for, after having shown the possibility of these changes, it would still be necessary, prior to granting them, to demonstrate at least their probability. Moreover, if it seems man’s arms could have served as legs when needed, that is the sole observation {95} favorable to that theory out of a great number of others that are contrary to it. The chief ones are that the manner in which man’s head is attached to his body, instead of directing his view horizontally (as is the case for all other animals and for man himself when he walks upright), would have kept him, while walking on all fours, with his eyes fixed directly on the ground, a situation hardly conducive to the preservation of the individual; that the tail he is lacking, and for which he has no use when walking on two feet, is useful to quadrupeds, and none of them is deprived of one; that the breast of a woman, very well located for a biped who holds her child in her arms, is so poorly located for a quadruped that none has it located in that way; that, since the hind part is of an excessive height in proportion to the forelegs (which causes us to crawl on our knees when walking on all fours), the whole would have made an animal that was poorly proportioned and that walked uncomfortably; that if he had placed his foot as well as his hand down flat, he would have had one less articulation in the hind leg than do other animals, namely, the one that joins the cannon⁶⁸ to the tibia; and that by setting down only the tip of the foot, as doubtlessly he would have been forced to do, the tarsus (not to mention the plurality of bones that make it up) appears too large to take the place of the cannon, and its articulations with the metatarsus and the tibia too close together to give the human leg in this situation the same flexibility as those of quadrupeds. Since the example of children is taken from an age when natural forces are not yet developed nor the members strengthened, it proves nothing whatever. I might just as well say that dogs are not destined to walk because several weeks after their birth they merely crawl. Particular facts also have little force against the universal practice of all men, even of nations that have had no communication with others and so could not have imitated anything about them. A child abandoned in a forest before he is able to walk and nourished by some beast will have followed the example of his nurse in training himself to walk like her. Habit could have given him capabilities he did not have from nature, and just as one-armed men are successful, by dint of exercise, at doing with their feet whatever we do with our hands, he will finally have succeeded in using his hands as feet.

Note iv (page 47, “its natural fertility”) Should there be found among my readers a scientist bad enough to try to cause me difficulties regarding this supposition of the natural fertility of the earth, I am going to answer him with the following passage:

“As plants derive for their sustenance much more substance from air and water than they do from the earth, it happens that when they rot they return to the earth more than they have derived from it.⁶⁹ Moreover, a forest captures rainwater by stopping evaporation. Thus, in a wooded area that was {96} preserved for a long time without being touched, the bed of earth that serves for vegetation would increase considerably. But since animals return to the soil less than they derive from it, and since men consume huge quantities of wood and plants for fire and other uses, it follows that the bed of vegetative earth of an inhabited country must always diminish and finally become like the terrain of Arabia Petraea⁷⁰ and like that of so many other provinces of the Orient (which in fact is the region that has been inhabited from the most ancient times), where only salt and sand are found. For the fixed salt of plants and animals remains, while all the other parts are volatilized.” Mr. Buffon, Hist. Nat.

Moreover the evidence corresponds to the theory, witness the quantity of trees and plants of every sort that filled almost all the uninhabited islands that have been discovered in the last few centuries, and what history teaches us about the immense forests all over the earth that had to be cut down as each region in turn became populated or civilized. On this I will also make the following three remarks. First, if there is a kind of vegetation that can make up for the loss of vegetative matter that was occasioned by animals, according to Mr. Buffon’s reasoning, it is above all the wooded areas, where the treetops and the leaves gather and appropriate more water and vapors than do other plants. Second, the destruction of the soil, that is, the loss of the substance that is appropriate for vegetation, should accelerate in proportion as the earth is more cultivated and as more skillful inhabitants consume in greater abundance its products of every sort. My third and most important remark is that the fruits of trees supply animals with more abundant nourishment than other forms of vegetation are capable of—an experiment I made myself by comparing the products of two landmasses of equal size and quality, the one covered with chestnut trees and the other sown with wheat.

Note v (page 48, “various foods”) Among the quadrupeds, the two most universal distinguishing traits of carnivorous species are derived, on the one hand, from the shape of the teeth and, on the other, from the structure of the intestines. Animals that live solely on vegetation all have flat teeth like the horse, ox, sheep, and hare, but carnivorous animals have pointed teeth like the cat, dog, wolf, and fox. And as for the intestines, the frugivorous ones have some, such as the colon, which are not found in carnivorous animals. It appears therefore that man, having teeth and intestines like frugivorous animals, should naturally be placed in that class. And not only do anatomical observations confirm this opinion, but the monuments of antiquity are also very favorable to it. “Dicaearchus,” says St. Jerome, “relates in his books on Greek antiquities that under the reign of Saturn, when the earth was still fertile by itself, no man ate flesh, but that all lived on fruits and vegetables that {97} grew naturally.” (Adv. Jovinian., Bk. II)⁷¹ <This opinion can also be supported by the reports of several modern travelers. François Corréal,⁷² among others, testifies that the majority of inhabitants of the Bahamas, whom the Spaniards transported to the islands of Cuba, Santo Domingo, and elsewhere, died from having eaten flesh.> From this one can see that I am neglecting several advantageous considerations that I could turn to account. For since prey is nearly the exclusive subject of fighting among carnivorous animals, and since frugivorous animals live among themselves in continual peace, if the human species were of this latter genus, it is clear that it would have had a much easier time subsisting in the state of nature and much less need and occasion to leave it.

Note vi (page 48, “as it were, with one”) All the kinds of knowledge that demand reflection, all those acquired only by the concatenation of ideas and that are perfected only over time, appear to be utterly beyond the grasp of savage man, owing to the lack of communication with his fellowmen, that is to say, owing to the lack of the instrument that is used for that communication and to the lack of the needs that make it necessary. His understanding and his skills are limited to jumping, running, fighting, throwing a stone, climbing a tree. But if he knows only those things, in return he knows them much better than we, who do not have the same need for them as he. And since they depend exclusively on bodily exercise and are not capable of any communication or progress from one individual to another, the first man could have been just as adept at them as his last descendants.

The reports of travelers are full of examples of the force and vigor of men of barbarous and savage nations. They praise scarcely less their adroitness and nimbleness. And since eyes alone are needed to observe these things, nothing hinders us from giving credence to what eyewitnesses certify on the matter. I draw some random examples from the first books that fall into my hands.

“The Hottentots,” says Kolben,⁷³ “understand fishing better than the Europeans at the Cape. Their skill is equal when it comes to the net, the hook, and the spear, in coves as well as in rivers. They catch fish by hand no less skillfully. They are incomparably good at swimming. Their style of swimming has something surprising about it, something entirely unique to them. They swim with their body upright and their hands stretched out of the water, so that they appear to be walking on land. In the greatest agitation of the sea, when the waves form so many mountains, they somehow dance on the top of the waves, rising and falling like a piece of cork.

{98} “The Hottentots,” says the same author further, “are surprisingly good at hunting, and the nimbleness of their running surpasses the imagination.” He is amazed that they did not put their agility to ill use more often, which, however, sometimes happens, as can be judged from the example he gives. “A Dutch sailor,” he says, “on disembarking at the Cape, charged a Hottentot to follow him to the city with a roll of tobacco that weighed about twenty pounds. When they were both some distance from the crew, the Hottentot asked the sailor if he knew how to run. ‘Run!’ answered the Dutchman, ‘yes, very well.’ ‘Let us see,’ answered the African. And fleeing with the tobacco, he disappeared almost immediately. The sailor, confounded by such marvelous quickness, did not think of following him, and he never again saw either his tobacco or his porter.

“They have such quick sight and such a sure hand that Europeans cannot compete with them. At a hundred paces they will hit with a stone a mark the size of a halfpenny. And what is more amazing, instead of fixing their eyes on the target as we do, they make continuous movements and contortions. It appears that their stone is carried by an invisible hand.”

Father Du Tertre⁷⁴ says about the savages of the Antilles nearly the same things that you have just read about the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope. He praises, above all, their accuracy in shooting with their arrows birds in flight and swimming fish, which they then catch by diving for them. The savages of North America are no less famous for their strength and adroitness, and here is an example that will lead us to form a judgment about those qualities in the Indians of South America.

In the year 1746, an Indian from Buenos Aires, having been condemned to the galleys of Cadiz, proposed to the governor that he buy back his liberty by risking his life at a public festival. He promised that by himself he would attack the fiercest bull with no other weapon in his hand but a rope; that he would bring him to the ground, seize him with his rope by whatever part they would indicate, saddle him, bridle him, mount him, and so mounted he would fight two other of the fiercest bulls to be released from the Torillo; and that he would put all of them to death, one after the other, the moment they would command him to do so and without anyone’s help. This was granted to him. The Indian kept his word and succeeded in everything he had promised. On the way in which he did it and on the details of the fight, one can consult Mr. Gautier, Observations sur l’Histoire Naturelle, Vol. I (in-12°), p. 262, whence this report is taken.

Note vii (page 50, “equal in this respect”) “The life span of horses,” says Mr. Buffon, “is, as in all other species of animals, proportionate to the length of their growth period. Man, who takes fourteen years to grow, can live six or seven times as long, that is to say, ninety or a hundred years. The horse, whose {99} growth period is four years, can live six or seven times as long, that is to say, twenty-five or thirty years. The examples that could be contrary to this rule are so rare that they should not even be regarded as an exception from which conclusions can be drawn. And just as large horses achieve their growth in less time than slender horses, they also have a shorter life span and are old from the age of fifteen.”

Note viii (page 50, “number of young”) I believe I see another difference between carnivorous and frugivorous animals still more general than the one I have remarked upon in Note v, since this one extends to birds. This difference consists in the number of young, which never exceeds two in each litter for the species that lives exclusively on plant life and ordinarily exceeds this number for carnivorous animals. It is easy to know nature’s plan in this regard by the number of teats, which is only two in each female of the first species, like the mare, the cow, the goat, the doe, the ewe, etc., and which is always six or eight in the other females, such as the dog, the cat, the wolf, the tigress, etc. The hen, the goose, the duck, which are all omnivorous⁷⁵ birds (as are the eagle, the sparrow hawk, the screech owl), also lay and hatch a large number of eggs, which never happens to the pigeon, the turtledove, or to birds that eat nothing but grain, which lay and hatch scarcely more than two eggs at a time. The reason that can be given for this difference is that the animals that live exclusively on grass and plants, remaining nearly the entire day grazing and being forced to spend considerable time feeding themselves, could not be up to the task of nursing several young; whereas the carnivorous animals, taking their meal almost in an instant, can more easily and more often return to their young and to their hunting and can compensate for the loss of so large a quantity of milk. There would be many particular observations and reflections to make on all this, but this is not the place to make them, and it is enough for me to have shown in this part the most general system of nature, a system that furnishes a new reason to remove man from the class of carnivorous animals and to place him among the frugivorous species.

Note ix (page 53, “himself and nature”) A famous author, on calculating the goods and evils of human life and comparing the two sums, has found that the latter greatly exceeded the former and that, all things considered, life was a rather poor present for man.⁷⁶ I am not surprised by his conclusion; he has drawn all of his arguments from the constitution of civil man. Had he gone back as far as natural man, the judgment can be made that he would have found very different results, that he would have realized that man has {100} scarcely any evils other than those he has given himself, and that nature would have been vindicated. It is not without trouble that we have managed to make ourselves so unhappy. When, on the one hand, one considers the immense labors of men, so many sciences searched into, so many arts invented, and so many forces employed, abysses filled up, mountains razed, rocks broken, rivers made navigable, lands cleared, lakes dug, marshes drained, enormous buildings raised upon the earth, the sea covered with ships and sailors, and when, on the other hand, one searches with a little meditation for the true advantages that have resulted from all this for the happiness of the human species, one cannot help being struck by the astonishing disproportion that exists between these things and to deploring man’s blindness, which, to feed his foolish pride and who knows what vain sense of self-importance, makes him run ardently after all the miseries to which he is susceptible, and which beneficent nature has taken pains to keep from him.

Men are wicked; a sad and continual experience dispenses us from having to prove it. Nevertheless, man is naturally good; I believe I have demonstrated it. What therefore can have depraved him to this degree, if not the changes that have befallen his constitution, the progress he has made, and the sorts of knowledge he has acquired? Let human society be admired as much as one wants; it will be no less true that it necessarily brings men to hate one another to the extent that their interests are at cross-purposes with one another, to render mutually to one another apparent services and in fact do every evil imaginable to one another. What is one to think of an interaction where the reason of each private individual dictates to him maxims directly contrary to those that public reason preaches to the body of society, and where each finds his profit in the misfortune of another? Perhaps there is not a wealthy man whose death is not secretly hoped for by greedy heirs and often by his own children; not a ship at sea whose wreck would not be good news to some merchant; not a firm that a defaulting debtor would not wish to see burn with all the papers it contains; not a people that does not rejoice at the disasters of its neighbors. Thus it is that we find our advantage in the setbacks of our fellowmen and that one person’s loss almost always brings about another’s prosperity. But what is even more dangerous is that public calamities are anticipated and hoped for by a multitude of private individuals. Some want diseases, others death, others war, others famine. I have seen ghastly men weep with sadness at the prospect of a fertile year. And the great and deadly fire of London,⁷⁷ which cost the lives or the goods of so many unfortunates, made the fortunes of perhaps more than ten thousand people. I know that Montaigne blames the Athenian Demades for having had a worker punished who, by selling coffins at a high price, made a great deal from the death of the citizens.⁷⁸ However, according to the reason Montaigne proposes, namely {101} that everyone would have to be punished, it is evident that this reason confirms my own. Let us therefore penetrate, behind our frivolous expressions of goodwill, to what happens at the bottom of our hearts; and let us reflect on what the state of things must be where all men are forced to caress and destroy one another and where they are born enemies by duty and crooks by interest. If someone answers me by claiming that society is constituted in such a manner that each man gains by serving others, I will reply that this would be very well and good, provided he did not gain still more by harming them. There is no profit, however legitimate, that is not surpassed by one that can be made illegitimately, and wrong done to a neighbor is always more lucrative than services. It is therefore no longer a question of anything but finding the means of being assured of impunity. And this is what the powerful spend all their strength on, and the weak all their clever machinations.

Savage man, when he has eaten, is at peace with all nature and the friend of all his fellowmen. Is it sometimes a question of his disputing over his meal? He never comes to blows without having first compared the difficulty of winning with that of finding his sustenance elsewhere. And since pride is not involved in the fight, it is ended by a few swings of the fist. The victor eats, the vanquished is on his way to seek his fortune, and the quarrel is over. But for man in society, it is a quite different business. It is first of all a question of providing for the necessary and then for the superfluous; next come delights, and then immense riches, and then subjects, and then slaves. He has not a moment’s respite. What is most singular is that the less natural and pressing the needs, the more the passions increase and, what is worse, the power to satisfy them; so that after long periods of prosperity, after having swallowed up many treasures and ruined many men, my hero will end by butchering everything until he is the sole master of the universe. This, in brief, is a faithful representation of our mores—if not of human life, then at least of the secret pretensions in the heart of every civilized man.

Compare, without prejudices, the state of civil man with that of savage man and seek, if you can, how many new doors to suffering and death (without even mentioning his wickedness, his needs, and his miseries) the former has opened. If you consider the emotional turmoil that consumes us, the violent passions that exhaust and desolate us, the excessive labors with which the poor are overburdened, the still more dangerous softness to which the rich abandon themselves and that cause the former to die of their needs and the latter of their excesses; if you call to mind the monstrous combinations of foods, their pernicious seasonings, the corrupted foodstuffs, tainted drugs, the knavery of those who sell them, the errors of those who administer them, the poison of the vessels in which they are prepared; if you pay attention to the epidemic diseases engendered by the bad air among the multitudes of men gathered together, to the illnesses occasioned by the effeminacy of our lifestyle, by the coming and going from the inside of our houses to the open air, the use of garments put on or taken off with too little precaution, and {102} all the cares that our excessive sensuality has turned into necessary habits, the neglect or privation of which then costs us our life or our health; if you take into account fires and earthquakes, which, in consuming or turning upside down whole cities, cause their inhabitants to die by the thousands; in a word, if you unite the dangers that all these causes continually gather over our heads, you will realize how dearly nature makes us pay for the scorn we have shown for her lessons.

I will not repeat here what I have said elsewhere about war, but I wish that informed men would, for once, want or dare to give the public the detail of the horrors that are committed in armies by those who contract to provide food or medical care. One would see that their not too secret maneuvers, on account of which the most brilliant armies dissolve into less than nothing, cause more soldiers to perish than are cut down by enemy swords. Moreover, no less surprising is the calculation of the number of men swallowed up by the sea every year, by either hunger, or scurvy, or pirates, or fire, or shipwrecks. It is clear that we must also put to the account of established property, and consequently to that of society, the assassinations, the poisonings, the highway robberies, and even the punishments of these crimes, punishments necessary to prevent greater ills, but that, costing the lives of two or more for the murder of one man, do not fail really to double the loss to the human species. How many are the shameful ways to prevent the birth of men or to fool nature: either by those brutal and depraved tastes that insult its most charming work, tastes that neither savages nor animals ever knew, and that have arisen in civilized countries only as the result of a corrupt imagination; or by those secret abortions, worthy fruits of debauchery and vicious honor; or by the exposure or the murder of a multitude of infants, victims of the misery of their parents or of the barbarous shame of their mothers; or, finally, by the mutilation of those unfortunates, part of whose existence and all of whose posterity are sacrificed to vain songs or, what is worse still, to the brutal jealousy of a few men—a mutilation that, in this last case, doubly outrages nature, both by the treatment received by those who suffer it and by the use to which they are destined.⁷⁹

<But are there not a thousand more frequent and even more dangerous cases in which paternal rights overtly offend humanity? How many talents are buried and inclinations are forced by the imprudent constraint of fathers! How many men would have distinguished themselves in a suitable station who die unhappy and dishonored in another station for which they have no taste! How many happy but unequal marriages have been broken or disturbed, and how many chaste wives dishonored by this order of conditions always in contradiction with that of nature! How many other bizarre unions formed by interests and disavowed by love and by reason! How many even honest and {103} virtuous couples cause themselves torment because they were ill matched! How many young and unhappy victims of their parents’ greed plunge into vice or pass their sorrowful days in tears and moan in indissoluble chains that the heart rejects and that gold alone has formed! Happy sometimes are those whose courage and even virtue tear them from life before a barbarous violence forces them into crime or despair. Forgive me, father and mother, who are forever pitiable. I regrettably worsen your sorrows; but may they serve as an eternal and terrible example to whoever dares, in the name of nature, to violate the most sacred of its rights!

If I have spoken only of those ill-formed relationships that are the result of our civil order, is one to think that those where love and sympathy have presided are themselves exempt from drawbacks?>

What would happen if I were to undertake to show the human species attacked in its very source, and even in the most holy of all bonds, where one no longer dares to listen to nature until one has taken into account one’s financial interests, and where, with civil disorder confounding virtues and vices, continence becomes a criminal precaution, and the refusal to give life to one’s fellowman an act of humanity? But without tearing away the veil that covers so many horrors, let us content ourselves with pointing out the evil, for which others must supply the remedy.

Let us add to all this that quantity of unwholesome trades that shorten lives or destroy one’s health, such as work in mines, various jobs involving the processing of metals, minerals, and especially lead, copper, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, realgar; those other perilous trades that every day cost the lives of a number of workers, some of them roofers, others carpenters, others masons, others working in quarries; let us bring all of these objects together, I say, and we will be able to see in the establishment and the perfection of societies the reasons for the diminution of the species, observed by more than one philosopher.

Luxury, impossible to prevent among men who are greedy for their own conveniences and for the esteem of others, soon completes the evil that societies have begun; and on the pretext of keeping the poor alive (but of course they should not have been reduced to poverty in the first place), luxury impoverishes everyone else and sooner or later depopulates the state.

Luxury is a remedy far worse than the evil it means to cure; or rather it is itself the worst of all evils in any state, however large or small it may be, and which, in order to feed the hordes of lackeys and wretches it has produced, crushes and ruins the laborer and the citizen—like those scorching south winds that, by covering grass and greenery with devouring insects, take sustenance away from useful animals and bring scarcity and death to all the places where they make themselves felt.

From society and the luxury it engenders, arise the liberal and mechanical arts, commerce, letters, and all those useless things that make skills flourish, enriching and ruining states. The reason for this decay is quite simple. It is {104} easy to see that agriculture, by its nature, must be the least lucrative of all the arts, because, with its product being of the most indispensable use to all men, its price must be proportionate to the abilities of the poorest. From the same principle can be drawn this rule: that, in general, the arts are lucrative in inverse proportion to their usefulness and that the most necessary must finally become the most neglected. From this it is clear what must be thought of the true advantages of skills and of the real effect that results from their progress.

Such are the discernible causes of all the miseries into which opulence finally brings down the most admired nations. To the degree that skills and the arts expand and flourish, the scorned farmer, burdened with taxes necessary to maintain luxury and condemned to spend his life between toil and hunger, abandons his fields to go to the cities in search of the bread he ought to be carrying there. The more the capital cities strike the stupid eyes of the people as wonderful, the more it will be necessary to groan at the sight of countrysides abandoned, fields fallow, and main roads jammed with unhappy citizens who have become beggars or thieves, destined to end their misery one day on the rack or on a dung heap. Thus it is that the state, enriching itself on the one hand, weakens and depopulates itself on the other and that the most powerful monarchies, after much labor to become opulent and deserted, end by becoming the prey of poor nations that succumb to the deadly temptation to invade them and that enrich and enfeeble themselves in their turn, until they are themselves invaded and destroyed by others.

Let someone deign to explain to us for once what could have produced those hordes of barbarians that for so many centuries have overrun Europe, Asia, and Africa. Was it to the skills of their arts, the wisdom of their laws, the excellence of their civil order that they owed that prodigious population? Would our learned ones be so kind as to tell us why, far from multiplying to that degree, those ferocious and brutal men, without enlightenment, without restraint, without education, did not all kill one another at every moment in the course of arguing with one another over their fodder or their game? Let them explain to us how these wretches even had the gall to look right in the eye such capable people as we were, with such fine military discipline, such fine codes, and such wise laws, and why, finally, after society was perfected in the countries of the north and so many pains were taken there to teach men their mutual duties and the art of living together agreeably and peaceably, we no longer see come out of them anything like those multitudes of men they produced formerly. I am very much afraid that someone might finally get it into his head to reply to me that all these great things, namely, the arts, sciences, and laws, have been very wisely invented by men as a salutary plague to prevent the excessive multiplication of the species, out of fear that this world, which is destined for us, might finally become too small for its inhabitants.

What then! Must we destroy societies, annihilate thine and mine, and return to live in the forests with bears?—a conclusion in the style of my {105} adversaries, which I prefer to anticipate, rather than leave to them the shame of drawing it. Oh you, to whom the heavenly voice has not made itself heard and who recognize for your species no other destination except to end this brief life in peace! You who can leave in the midst of the cities your deadly acquisitions, your troubled minds, your corrupt hearts, and your unbridled desires! Since it depends on you, retake your ancient and first innocence; go into the woods to lose sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries, and have no fear of bringing your species into disgrace by renouncing its enlightenment in order to renounce its vices. As for men like me, whose passions have forever destroyed their original simplicity, who can no longer feed on grass and acorn[s], nor get by without laws and chiefs; those who were honored in their first father with supernatural lessons; those who will see, in the intention of giving human actions from the beginning a morality they would not have acquired for a long time, the reason for a precept indifferent in itself and inexplicable in any other system; those, in a word, who are convinced that the divine voice called the entire human race to the enlightenment and the happiness of the celestial intelligences; all those latter ones will attempt, through the exercise of virtues they oblige themselves to practice while learning to know them, to merit the eternal reward that they ought to expect for them. They will respect the sacred bonds of the societies of which they are members; they will love their fellowmen and will serve them with all their power; they will scrupulously obey the laws and the men who are their authors and their ministers; they will honor above all the good and wise princes who will know how to prevent, cure, or palliate that pack of abuses and evils always ready to overpower us; they will animate the zeal of these worthy chiefs by showing them without fear or flattery the greatness of their task and the rigor of their duty. Nevertheless they will scorn a constitution that can be maintained only with the help of so many respectable people, who are desired more often than they are obtained, and from which, despite all their care, always arise more real calamities than apparent advantages.⁸⁰

Note x (page 54, “purely animal functions”) Among the men we know, whether by ourselves, or from historians, or from travelers, some are black, others white, others red. Some wear their hair long; others have merely curly wool. Some are almost entirely covered with hair; others do not even have a beard. There have been and perhaps there still are nations of men of gigantic size; and apart from the fable of the Pygmies (which may well be merely an {106} exaggeration), we know that the Laplanders and above all the Greenlanders are considerably below the average size of man. It is even maintained that there are entire peoples who have tails like quadrupeds. And without putting blind faith in the accounts of Herodotus and Ctesias,⁸¹ we can at least draw from them the very likely opinion that had one been able to make good observations in those ancient times when various peoples followed lifestyles differing more greatly among themselves than do those of today, one would have also noted much more striking variations in the shape and posture of the body. All these facts, for which it is easy to furnish incontestable proofs, are capable of surprising only those who are accustomed to look solely at the objects that surround them and who are ignorant of the powerful effects of the diversity of climates, air, foods, lifestyle, habits in general, and especially the astonishing force of the same causes when they act continually for long successions of generations. Today, when commerce, voyages, and conquests reunite various peoples further, and their lifestyles are constantly approximating one another through frequent communication, it is evident that certain national differences have diminished; and, for example, everyone can take note of the fact that today’s Frenchmen are no longer those large, white, and blond-haired bodies described by Latin historians, although time, together with the mixture of the Franks and the Normans, themselves white and blond-haired, should have reestablished what commerce with the Romans could have removed from the influence of the climate in the natural constitution and complexion of the inhabitants. All of these observations on the varieties that a thousand causes can produce and have in fact produced in the human species cause me to wonder whether the various animals similar to men, taken without much scrutiny by travelers for beasts, either because of some differences they noticed in their outward structure or simply because these animals did not speak, would not in fact be veritable savage men, whose race, dispersed in the woods during olden times, had not had an occasion to develop any of its virtual faculties, had not acquired any degree of perfection, and was still found in the primitive state of nature. Let us give an example of what I mean.

“There are found in the kingdom of the Congo,” says the translator of the Histoire des Voyages, “many of those large animals called orangutans in the East Indies, which occupy a middle ground between the human species and the baboons. Battel⁸² relates that in the forests of Mayomba, in the kingdom of Loango,⁸³ one sees two kinds of monsters, the larger of which are called pongos and the others enjocos.⁸⁴ The former bear an exact resemblance to man, except they are much larger and very tall. With a human face, they have very {107} deep-set eyes. Their hands, cheeks, and ears are without hair, except for their eyebrows, which are very long. Although the rest of their body is quite hairy, the hair is not very thick. The color of the hair is brown. Finally, the only part that distinguishes them from men is their leg, which has no calf. They walk upright, grasping the hair of their neck with their hand. Their retreat is in the woods. They sleep in the trees, and there they make a kind of roof that offers them shelter from the rain. Their foods are fruits or wild nuts; they never eat flesh. The custom of the Negroes who cross the forests is to light fires during the night. They note that in the morning, at their departure, the pongos take their place around the fire and do not withdraw until it is out; because, for all their cleverness, they do not have enough sense to lay wood on the fire to keep it going.

“They occasionally walk in groups and kill the Negroes who cross the forests. They even fall upon elephants who come to graze in the places they inhabit, and they irritate the elephants so much with punches or with whacks of a stick that they force them howling to take flight. Pongos are never taken alive, because they are so strong that ten men would not be enough to stop them. But the Negroes take a good many young ones after having killed the mother, to whose body the young stick very closely. When one of these animals dies, the others cover its body with a pile of branches or leaves. Purchass⁸⁵ adds that, in the conversations he has had with Battel, he had learned that a pongo abducted a little Negro from him who passed an entire month in the society of these animals, for they do not harm men they take by surprise, at least when these men do not pay any attention to them, as the little Negro had observed. Battel had not described the second species of monster.

“Dapper⁸⁶ confirms that the kingdom of the Congo is filled with those animals that in the Indies bear the name orangutans, that is to say, inhabitants of the woods, and that the Africans call quojas-morros. This beast, he says, is so similar to man, that it has occurred to some travelers that it could have issued from a woman and a monkey—a myth that even the Negroes reject. One of these animals was transported from the Congo to Holland and presented to the Prince of Orange, Frederick Henry. It was the height of a three-year-old child, moderately stocky, but square and well proportioned, very agile and lively; its legs fleshy and robust; the entire front of the body naked, but the rear covered with black hairs. At first sight, its face resembled that of a man, but it had a flat and turned-up nose; its ears were also those of the human species, its breast (for it was a female) was plump, its navel sunken, its shoulders very well joined, its hands divided into fingers and thumbs, its calves and heels fat and fleshy. It often walked upright on its legs. It was capable of lifting and {108} carrying heavy burdens. When it wanted to drink, it took the cover of the pot in one hand, and held the base with the other; afterward it graciously wiped its lips. It lay down to sleep with its head on a cushion, covering itself with such skill that it would have been taken for a man in bed. The Negroes tell strange stories about this animal. They assert not only that it takes women and girls by force but that it dares to attack armed men. In a word, there is great likelihood that it is the satyr of the ancients. Perhaps Merolla⁸⁷ is speaking only of these animals when he relates that Negroes sometimes lay hold of savage men and women in their hunts.”

These species of anthropomorphic animals are again discussed in the third volume of the same Histoire des Voyages under the name of beggos and mandrills. But sticking to the preceding accounts, we find in the description of these alleged monsters striking points of conformity with the human species and lesser differences than those that would be assigned between one man and another. From these pages it is not clear what the reasons are that the authors have for refusing to give the animals in question the name “savage men”; but it is easy to conjecture that it is on account of their stupidity and also because they did not speak—feeble reasons for those who know that although the organ of speech is natural to man, nevertheless speech itself is not natural to him, and who know to what point his perfectibility can have elevated civil man above his original state. The small number of lines these descriptions contain can enable us to judge how badly these animals have been observed and with what prejudices they have been viewed. For example, they are categorized as monsters, and yet there is agreement that they reproduce. In one place, Battel says that the pongos kill the Negroes who cross the forests; in another place, Purchass adds that they do not do any harm, even when they surprise them, at least when the Negroes do not fix their gaze upon them. The pongos gather around fires lit by the Negroes upon the Negroes’ withdrawal and withdraw in their turn when the fire is out. There is the fact. Here now is the commentary of the observer: because, for all their cleverness, they do not have enough sense to lay wood on the fire to keep it going. I would like to hazard a guess how Battel, or Purchass, his compiler, could have known that the withdrawal of the pongos was an effect of their stupidity rather than their will. In a climate such as Loango, fire is not something particularly necessary for the animals; and if the Negroes light a fire, it is less against the cold than to frighten ferocious beasts. It is therefore a very simple matter that, after having been for some time delighted with the flame or being well warmed, the pongos grow tired of always remaining in the same place and go off to graze, which requires more time than if they ate flesh. Moreover, we know that most animals, man not excluded, are naturally lazy and that they refuse all sorts of efforts that are not absolutely necessary. Finally, it seems very strange that pongos, whose adroitness and strength are praised, the pongos who know how to bury {109} their dead and to make themselves roofs out of branches, should not know how to push wood into the fire. I recall having seen a monkey perform the same maneuver that people deny the pongos can do. It is true that since my ideas were not oriented in this direction, I myself committed the mistake for which I reproach our travelers: I neglected to examine whether the intention of the monkey was actually to sustain the fire or simply, as I believe is the case, to imitate the actions of a man. Whatever the case may be, it is well demonstrated that the monkey is not a variety of man: not only because he is deprived of the faculty of speech, but above all because it is certain that his species does not have the faculty of perfecting itself, which is the specific characteristic of the human species: experiments that do not seem to have been made on the pongos and the orangutan with sufficient care to enable one to draw the same conclusion in their case. However, there would be a means by which, if the orangutan or others were of the human species, even the least sophisticated observers could assure themselves of it in a definitive fashion. But beyond the fact that a single generation would not be sufficient for this experiment, it should be regarded as unworkable, since it would be necessary that what is merely a supposition be demonstrated to be true and demonstrated before the test that should establish the fact of the matter could be innocently performed.⁸⁸

Judgments that are hasty, and that are not the fruit of an enlightened reason, are prone to be extreme. Without any fuss, our travelers made into beasts, under the names pongos, mandrills, orangutans, the same beings that the ancients, under the names satyrs, fauns, sylvans, made into divinities. Perhaps, after more precise investigations it will be found that they are <neither beasts nor gods but> men. Meanwhile, it would seem to me that there is as much reason to defer on this point to Merolla, an educated monk, an eyewitness, and one who, with all his naïveté, did not fail to be a man of intelligence, as to the merchant Battel, Dapper, Purchass, and the other compilers.

What judgment do we think such observers would have made regarding the child found in 1694, of whom I have spoken before, who gave no indication of reason, walked on his feet and hands, had no language, and made sounds that bore no resemblance whatever to those of a man? It took a long time, continues the same philosopher who provided me with this fact, before he could utter a few words, and then he did it in a barbarous manner. Once he could speak, he was questioned about his first state, but he did not recall it any more than we recall what happened to us in the cradle. If, unhappily⁸⁹ for him, this child had fallen into the hands of our travelers, there can be no {110} doubt that after having observed his silence and stupidity, they would have resolved to send him back to the woods or lock him up in a menagerie, after which they would have spoken eruditely about him in their fine accounts as a very curious beast who looked rather like a man.

For the past three or four hundred years the inhabitants of Europe have inundated the other parts of the world and continually published new collections of travels and stories; yet I am convinced that we know no other men but the Europeans alone. Moreover, it would appear, from the ridiculous prejudices that have not been extinguished even among men of letters, that everybody does hardly anything under the pompous name of “the study of man” except study the men of his country. Individuals may well come and go. It seems that philosophy travels nowhere; moreover, the philosophy of one people is little suited to another. The reason for this is manifest, at least for distant countries. There are hardly more than four sorts of men who make long voyages: sailors, merchants, soldiers, and missionaries. Now we can hardly expect the first three classes to provide good observers; and as for those in the fourth, occupied by the sublime vocation that calls them, even if they were not subject to the prejudices of social position as are all the rest, we must believe that they would not voluntarily commit themselves to investigations that would appear to be sheer curiosity and that would sidetrack them from the more important works to which they are destined. Besides, to preach the Gospel in a useful manner, zeal alone is needed, and God gives the rest. But to study men, talents are needed that God is not required to give anyone and that are not always the portion of saints. One cannot open a book of voyages in which one does not find descriptions of characters and mores. But one is utterly astonished to see that these people who have described so many things have said merely what everyone already knew; that, at the other end of the world, they only knew how to recognize behavior that they could have discovered without leaving their own street; and that those true qualities that characterize nations and strike eyes made to see have almost always escaped theirs. Whence this fine moral slogan, so bandied about by the philosophizing rabble: that men are everywhere the same; that, since everywhere they have the same passions and the same vices, it is rather pointless to seek to characterize different peoples—which is about as well reasoned as it would be for someone to say that Peter and James cannot be distinguished from one another because they both have a nose, a mouth, and eyes.

Will we never see those happy days reborn when the people did not dabble in philosophizing, but when a Plato, a Thales, a Pythagoras, taken with an ardent desire to know, undertook the greatest voyages merely to inform themselves and went far away to shake off the yoke of national prejudices in order to learn to know men by their similarities and their differences and to acquire those sorts of universal knowledge that are not exclusively those of a single century or country, but that, since they are of all times and all places, are, as it were, the common science of the wise?

{111} We admire the splendor of some curious men who, at great expense, made or caused to be made voyages to the Orient with learned men and painters in order to sketch hovels and to decipher or copy inscriptions. But I have trouble conceiving how, in a century where people take pride in fine sorts of knowledge, there are not to be found two men linked closely together—rich, one in money, the other in genius, both loving glory and aspiring for immortality—one of whom sacrifices twenty thousand crowns of his goods and the other ten years of his life for a famous voyage around the world in order to study, not always rocks and plants but, for once, men and mores, and who, after so many centuries used to measure and examine the house, would finally be of a mind to want to know its inhabitants.

The academicians who have traveled through the northern parts of Europe and the southern parts of America had for their object to visit them more as geometers than as philosophers. Nevertheless, since they were both simultaneously, we cannot regard as utterly unknown the regions that have been seen and described by La Condamine and Maupertuis.⁹⁰ The jeweler Chardin, who has traveled like Plato, has left nothing to be said about Persia. China seemed to have been well observed by the Jesuits. Kempfer⁹¹ gives a passable idea of what little he has seen in Japan. Except for these reports, we know nothing about the peoples of the East Indies, who have been visited exclusively by Europeans interested more in filling their purses than their heads. All of Africa and its numerous inhabitants, as unique in character as in color, are yet to be examined. The entire earth is covered with nations of which we know only the names, and we dabble in judging the human race! Let us suppose a Montesquieu, a Buffon, a Diderot, a Duclos, a d’Alembert, a Condillac, or men of that ilk traveling in order to inform their compatriots, observing and describing as they know how to do Turkey, Egypt, Barbary, the empire of Morocco, Guinea, the land of the Bantus, the interior of Africa and its eastern coastlines, the Malabars, Mogul, the banks of the Ganges, the kingdoms of Siam, Pegu, and Ava, China, Tartary, and especially Japan; then in the other hemisphere, Mexico, Peru, Chile, the straits of Magellan, not to forget the Patagonias true or false,⁹² Tucuman, Paraguay (if possible), Brazil; finally the Caribbean Islands, Florida, and all the savage countries—the most important voyage of all and the one that should be embarked upon with the greatest care. Let us suppose that these new Hercules, back from these memorable treks, then wrote at leisure the natural, moral, and political history of what {112} they would have seen; we ourselves would see a new world traced out by their pen, and we would thus learn to know our own. I say that when such observers will affirm of an animal that it is a man and of another that it is a beast, we will have to believe them. But it would be terribly simpleminded to defer in this to unsophisticated travelers, concerning whom we will sometimes be tempted to put the same question that they dabble at resolving concerning other animals.⁹³

Note xi (page 54, “his physical needs”) That appears utterly evident to me, and I am unable to conceive whence our philosophers can derive all the passions they ascribe to natural man. With the single exception of the physically necessary that nature itself demands, all our other needs are such merely out of habit (previous to which they were not needs) or by our own desires; and we do not desire what we are not in a position to know. Whence it follows that since savage man desires only the things he knows and knows only those things whose possession is in his power or easily acquired, nothing should be so tranquil as his soul and nothing so limited as his mind.

Note xii (page 57, “same nonchalance”) I find in Locke’s Civil Government an objection that seems to me too specious for me to be permitted to hide it.

“For the end of conjunction, between male and female,” says this philosopher, “being not barely procreation, but the continuation of the species; this conjunction betwixt male and female ought to last, even after procreation, so long as is necessary to the nourishment and support of the young ones, who are to be sustained by those that got them, till they are able to shift and provide for themselves. This rule, which the infinite wise maker hath set to the works of his hands, we find the inferior creatures steadily obey. In those viviparous animals which feed on grass, the conjunction between male and female lasts no longer than the very act of copulation; because the teat of the dam being sufficient to nourish the young, till it be able to feed on grass, the male only begets, but concerns not himself for the female or young, to whose sustenance he can contribute nothing. But in beasts of prey the conjunction lasts longer: because the dam not being able well to subsist herself, and nourish her numerous off-spring by her own prey alone, a more laborious, as well as more dangerous way of living, than by feeding on grass, the assistance of the male is necessary to the maintenance of their common family, which cannot subsist till they are able to prey for themselves, but by the joint care of male and female. The same is to be observed in all birds, (except some domestic ones, where plenty of food excuses the cock from feeding, and taking care of the young brood) whose young needing food in the nest, the cock and hen continue mates, till the young are able to use their wing, and provide for themselves.

{113} “And herein I think lies the chief, if not the only, reason, why the male and female in mankind are tied to a longer conjunction than other creatures, viz. because the female is capable of conceiving, and de facto is commonly with child again, and brings forth too a new birth, long before the former is out of a dependency for support on his parents’ help, and able to shift for himself, and has all the assistance is due to him from his parents: whereby the father, who is bound to take care for those he hath begot, is under an obligation to continue in conjugal society with the same woman longer than other creatures, whose young being able to subsist of themselves, before the time of procreation returns again, the conjugal bond dissolves of itself, and they are at liberty, till Hymen at his usual anniversary season summons them again to choose new mates. Wherein one cannot but admire the wisdom of the great Creator, who having given to man an ability to lay up for the future, as well as to supply the present necessity, hath made it necessary, that society of man and wife should be more lasting, than of male and female amongst other creatures; that so their industry might be encouraged, and their interest better united, to make provision and lay up goods for their common issue, which uncertain mixture, or easy and frequent solutions of conjugal society would mightily disturb.”⁹⁴

The same love of truth that has made me to set forth sincerely this objection moves me to accompany it with some remarks, if not to resolve it, at least to clarify it.

1. I will observe first that moral proofs⁹⁵ do not have great force in the natural sciences⁹⁶ and that they serve more to explain existing facts than to establish the real existence of those facts. Now such is the type of proof that Mr. Locke employs in the passage I have just quoted; for although it may be advantageous to the human species for the union between man and woman to be permanent, it does not follow that it has been thus established by nature. Otherwise it would be necessary to say that nature also instituted civil society, the arts, commerce, and all that is asserted to be useful to men.

2. I do not know where Mr. Locke has found that among animals of prey, the society of the male and female lasts longer than does the society of those that live on grass and that the former assists the latter to feed the young; for it is not manifest that the dog, the cat, the bear, or the wolf recognize their female better than the horse, the ram, the bull, the stag, or all the other {114} quadruped animals do theirs. On the contrary, it seems that if the assistance of the male were necessary to the female to preserve her young, it would be particularly in the species that live only on grass, because a long period of time is needed by the mother to graze and during that entire interval she is forced to neglect her brood, whereas the prey of a female bear or wolf is devoured in an instant, and, without suffering hunger, she has more time to nurse her young. This line of reasoning is confirmed by an observation upon the relative number of teats and young, which distinguishes carnivorous from frugivorous species, and of which I have spoken in Note viii. If this observation is accurate and general, since a woman has only two teats and rarely has more than one child at a time, this is one more strong reason for doubting that the human species is naturally carnivorous. Thus, it seems that, in order to draw Locke’s conclusion, it would be necessary to reverse completely his reasoning. There is no more solidity in the same distinction when it is applied to birds. For who could be persuaded that the union of the male and female is more durable among vultures and crows than among turtledoves? We have two species of domestic birds, the duck and the pigeon, that furnish us with examples directly contrary to the system of this author. The pigeon, which lives solely on grain, remains united to its female, and they feed their young in common. The duck, which is known to be carnivorous, recognizes neither its female nor its young and provides no help in their sustenance. And among hens, a species hardly less carnivorous, we do not observe that the rooster bothers itself in the least with the brood. And if in the other species the male shares with the female the care of feeding the young, it is because birds, which at first cannot fly and which the female cannot suckle, are much less in a position to get along without the help of the father than are quadrupeds, for which the mother’s teat is sufficient, at least for a time.

3. There is much uncertainty about the principal fact that serves as a basis for all of Mr. Locke’s reasoning; for in order to know whether, as he asserts, in the pure state of nature the female ordinarily is pregnant again and has a new child long before the preceding one could see to its needs by itself, it would be necessary to perform experiments that Mr. Locke surely did not perform and that no one is in a position to perform. The continual cohabitation of husband and wife is so likely to tempt them into risking a new pregnancy that it is very difficult to believe that the chance encounter or the mere impulsion of temperament produced such frequent effects in the pure state of nature as in that of conjugal society—a delay that would contribute perhaps toward making the children more robust and that, moreover, might be compensated by the power to conceive being prolonged to a greater age in women who would have abused it less in their youth. As for children, there are several reasons for believing that their capacities and their organs develop much later among us than they did in the primitive state of which I am speaking. The original weakness that they derive from the constitution of the parents, the cares taken to envelop and constrain all of their members, the softness in {115} which they are raised, perhaps the use of milk other than that of their mother, everything contradicts and slows down in them the initial progress of nature. The heed they are forced to pay to a thousand things on which their attention is continually fixed, while no exercise is given to their bodily forces, can also bring about considerable deflection from their growth. Thus, if, instead of first overworking and exhausting their minds in a thousand ways, their bodies were allowed to be exercised by the continual movements that nature seems to demand of them, it is to be believed that they would be in a much better position to walk and to provide for their needs by themselves.

4. Finally, Mr. Locke at most proves that there could well be in a man a motive for remaining attached to a woman when she has a child, but in no way does he prove that the man must have been attached to her before the childbirth and during the nine months of pregnancy. If a particular woman is indifferent to the man during those nine months, if she even becomes unknown to him, why will he help her after childbirth? Why will he help her to raise a child that he does not know belongs to him alone and whose birth he has neither decided upon nor foreseen? Evidently Mr. Locke presumes what is in question; for it is not a matter of knowing why the man will remain attached to the woman after childbirth but why he will be attached to her after conception. Once his appetite is satisfied, the man has no further need for a particular woman, nor the woman for a particular man. The man does not have the least care or perhaps the least idea of the consequences of his action. The one goes off in one direction, the other in another, and there is no likelihood that at the end of nine months they have the memory of having known one another. For this type of memory, by which one individual gives preference to another for the act of generation, requires, as I prove in the text, more progress or corruption in human understanding than may be supposed in man in the state of animality we are dealing with here. Another woman can therefore satisfy the new desires of the man as congenially as the one he has already known, and another man in the same manner satisfy the woman, supposing she is impelled by the same appetite during the time of pregnancy, about which one can reasonably be in doubt. And if in the state of nature the woman no longer feels the passion of love after the conception of the child, the obstacle to her society with the man thus becomes much greater still, since she then has no further need either for the man who has made her pregnant or for anyone else. There is not, therefore, in the man any reason to seek the same woman or in the woman any reason to seek the same man. Thus Locke’s reasoning falls in ruin, and all the dialectic of this philosopher has not shielded him from the mistake committed by Hobbes and others. They had to explain a fact of the state of nature, that is to say, of a state where men lived in isolation and where a particular man did not have any motive for living in proximity to another particular man, nor perhaps did a particular group of men have a motive for living in proximity to another particular group of men, which is much worse. And they gave no thought {116} to transporting themselves beyond the centuries of society, that is to say, of those times when men always have a reason for living in proximity to one another and when a particular man often has a reason for living in proximity to a particular man or woman.

Note xiii (page 57, “they are necessary”) I will hold back from embarking on the philosophical reflections that one could make concerning the advantages and disadvantages of this institution of languages. There are people who have permission to attack vulgar errors, but I am not one of them; and educated people respect their prejudices too much to abide patiently my alleged paradoxes. So let us allow those men to speak who have not been branded as criminals for occasionally daring to take the side of reason against the opinion of the multitude. “Nor would anything be deducted from the happiness of the human race if, when the disaster and confusion of so many languages has been cast out, mortals should cultivate one art and if it should be allowed to explain anything by means of signs, movements, and gestures. But now it has been so established that the condition of animals commonly believed to be brutes is considerably better than ours in this respect, inasmuch as they articulate their feelings and their thoughts without an interpreter more readily and perhaps more felicitously than any mortals can, especially if they are speaking a foreign language.”⁹⁷ Is. Vossius⁹⁸ de Poëmat. Cant. et Viribus Rythmi, p. 66.

Note xiv (page 60, “to discover numbers”) In showing how ideas of discrete quantity and its relationships are necessary in the humblest of the arts, Plato mocks with good reason the authors of his time who alleged that Palamedes⁹⁹ had invented numbers at the siege of Troy, as if, says this philosopher, Agamemnon could have been ignorant until then of how many legs he had. In fact, one senses the impossibility that society and the arts should have arrived at the point where they already were at the time of the siege of Troy unless men had the use of numbers and arithmetic. But the necessity for knowing numbers, before acquiring other types of knowledge, does not make their invention easier to imagine. Once the names of the numbers are known, it is easy to explain their meaning and to elicit the ideas that these names represent; but in order to invent them, it was necessary, prior to conceiving of these same ideas, to be, as it were, on familiar terms with philosophical meditations, to be trained to consider beings by their essence alone and independently of all other perception—a very difficult, very metaphysical, hardly natural abstraction, and yet one without which these ideas could never have been {117} transported from one species or genus to another, nor could numbers have become universal. A savage could consider separately his right leg and his left leg or look at them together under the indivisible idea of a pair without ever thinking that he had two of them; for the representative idea that portrays for us an object is one thing, and the numerical idea that determines it is another. Even less was he able to count to five. And although, by placing his hands one on top of the other, he could have noticed that the fingers corresponded exactly, he was far from thinking of their numerical equality. He did not know the sum of his fingers any more than that of his hairs. And if, after having made him understand what numbers are, someone had said to him that he had as many fingers as toes, he perhaps would have been quite surprised, in comparing them, to find that this was true.

Note xv (page 62, “egocentrism of his came into being”) We must not confuse egocentrism [amour propre] with love of oneself [amour de soi-même], two passions very different by virtue of both their nature and their effects. Love of oneself is a natural sentiment that moves every animal to be vigilant in its own preservation and that, directed in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue. Egocentrism is merely a sentiment that is relative, artificial, and born in society that moves each individual to value himself more than anyone else, that inspires in men all the evils they cause one another, and that is the true source of honor.

With this well understood, I say that in our primitive state, in the veritable state of nature, egocentrism does not exist; for since each particular man regards himself as the only spectator who observes him, as the only being in the universe that takes an interest in him, as the only judge of his own merit, it is impossible that a sentiment that has its source in comparisons that he is not in a position to make could germinate in his soul. For the same reason, this man could not have either hatred or desire for revenge, passions that can arise only from the belief that offense has been received. And since what constitutes the offense is scorn or the intention to harm and not the harm itself, men who know neither how to appraise nor to compare themselves can do considerable violence to one another when it returns them some advantage for doing it, without ever offending one another. In a word, on seeing his fellowmen hardly otherwise than he would see animals of another species, each man can carry away the prey of the weaker or yield his own to the stronger, viewing these lootings as merely natural events, without the least stirring of insolence or resentment and without any other passion but the sadness or the joy of a good or bad venture.

Note xvi (page 74, “the best for man”) It is something extremely remarkable that, for all the many years that the Europeans torment themselves in order to acclimate the savages of various countries to their lifestyle, they have not yet been able to win over a single one of them, not even by means of Christianity; {118} for our missionaries sometimes turn them into Christians, but never into civilized men. Nothing can overcome the invincible repugnance they have against appropriating our mores and living in our way. If these poor savages are as unhappy as is alleged, by what inconceivable depravity of judgment do they constantly refuse to civilize themselves in imitation of us or to learn to live happily among us; whereas one reads in a thousand places that the French and other Europeans have voluntarily taken refuge among those nations and have spent their entire lives there, no longer able to leave so strange a lifestyle; and whereas we even see level-headed missionaries regret with tenderness the calm and innocent days they have spent among those much scorned peoples? If one replies that they do not have enough enlightenment to make a sound judgment about their state and ours, I will reply that the reckoning of happiness is less an affair of reason than of sentiment. Moreover, this reply can be turned against us with still greater force; for there is a greater distance between our ideas and the frame of mind one would need to be in, in order to conceive the satisfaction that the savages find in their lifestyle than between the ideas of savages and those that can make them conceive our lifestyle. In fact, after a few observations it is easy for them to see that all our labors are directed toward but two objects, namely, the conveniences of life for oneself and esteem among others. But what are the means by which we are to imagine the sort of pleasure a savage takes in spending his life alone amid the woods, or fishing, or blowing into a sorry-looking flute without ever knowing how to get it to elicit a single note and without bothering himself to learn?

Savages have frequently been brought to Paris, London, and other cities; people have been eager to display our luxury, our wealth, and all our most useful and curious arts. None of this has ever excited in them anything but a stupid admiration, without the least stirring of covetousness. I recall, among others, the story of a chief of some North Americans who was brought to the court of England about thirty years ago. A thousand things were made to pass before his eye in an attempt to give him some present that could please him, but nothing was found about which he seemed to care. Our weapons seemed heavy and cumbersome to him, our shoes hurt his feet, our clothes restricted him; he rejected everything. Finally, it was noticed that, having taken a wool blanket, he seemed to take some pleasure in wrapping it around his shoulders. You will agree at least, someone immediately said to him, on the usefulness of this furnishing? Yes, he replies, this seems to me to be nearly as good as an animal skin. However, he would not have said that had he worn them both in the rain.

Perhaps someone will say to me that it is habit that, in attaching everyone to his lifestyle, prevents savages from realizing what is good in ours. In which case, it must at least appear quite extraordinary that habit has more force in maintaining savages in their preference for their misery than Europeans in their enjoyment of their felicity. But to give to this last objection a response to which there is not a word that can be said in reply, without adducing all {119} the young savages that people have tried in vain to civilize, without speaking of the Greenlanders and the inhabitants of Iceland, whom people have tried to raise and feed in Denmark, and all of whom sadness and despair caused to perish, whether from languor or in the sea when they attempted to regain their homeland by swimming back to it, I will be content to cite a single, well-documented example, which I give to the admirers of European civilization to examine.

“All the efforts of the Dutch missionaries at the Cape of Good Hope have never been able to convert a single Hottentot. Van der Stel, governor of the Cape, having taken one from infancy, had raised him in the principles of the Christian religion and in the practice of the customs of Europe. He was richly clothed; he was taught several languages and his progress corresponded very closely to the care that was taken for his education. Having great hopes for his wit, the governor sent him to the Indies with a commissioner general who employed him usefully in the affairs of the company. He returned to the Cape after the death of the commissioner. A few days after his return, on a visit he made to some of his Hottentot relatives, he made the decision to strip himself of his European dress in order to clothe himself with a sheepskin. He returned to the fort in this new outfit, carrying a bundle containing his old clothes, and, on presenting them to the governor, he made the following speech to him: ‘Please, sir, be so kind as to pay heed to the fact that I forever renounce this clothing. I also renounce the Christian religion for the rest of my life. My resolution is to live and die in the religion, ways, and customs of my ancestors. The only favor I ask of you is that you let me keep the necklace and cutlass I am wearing. I will keep them for love of you.’ Thereupon, without waiting for Van der Stel’s reply, he escaped by taking flight and was never seen again at the Cape.” Histoire des Voyages, vol. V, p. 175.

{120} Note xvii (page 78, “fights and murders”) One could raise against me the objection that, in such a disorder, men, instead of willfully murdering one another, would have dispersed, had there been no limits to their dispersion. But first, these limits would at least have been those of the world. And if one thinks about the excessive population that results from the state of nature, one will judge that the earth in that state would not have taken long to be covered with men thus forced to keep together. Besides, they would have dispersed, had the evil been rapid and had it been an overnight change. But they were born under the yoke; they were in the habit of carrying it by the time they felt its weight, and they were content to wait for the opportunity to shake it off. Finally, since they were already accustomed to a thousand conveniences that forced them to keep together, dispersion was no longer as easy as in the first ages, when, since no one had need for anyone but himself, everyone made his decision without waiting for someone else’s consent.

Note xviii (page 79, “new forces to the rich”) Marshal de V***¹⁰⁰ related that, on one of his campaigns, when the excessive knavery of a provisions supplier had made the army suffer and complain, he gave him a severe dressing down and threatened to have him hanged. “This threat has no effect on me,” the knave boldly replied to him, “and I am quite pleased to tell you that nobody hangs a man with a hundred thousand crowns at his disposal.” I do not know how it happened, the Marshal added naïvely, but in fact he was not hanged, even though he deserved to be a hundred times over.

Note xix (page 88, “inevitable among private individuals”) Distributive justice would still be opposed to this rigorous equality of the state of nature, even if it were workable in civil society. And since all the members of the state owe it services proportionate to their talents and forces, the citizens for their part should be distinguished and favored in proportion to their services. It is in this sense that one must understand a passage of Isocrates¹⁰¹ in which he praises the first Athenians for having known well how to distinguish that of the two sorts of equality was the more advantageous, one of which consists in portioning out indifferently to all citizens the same advantages, and the other in distributing them according to each one’s merit. These able politicians, adds the orator, in banishing that unjust equality that makes no differentiation between wicked and good men, adhered inviolably to that equality that rewards and punishes each according to his merit. But first, no society has ever existed, regardless of the degree of corruption they may have achieved, in which no differentiation between wicked and good men was made. And in the matter of mores, where the law cannot set a sufficiently precise measurement to serve as a rule for the magistrate, the law very wisely prohibits him from the judgment of persons, leaving him merely the judgment of actions in order not to leave the fate or the rank of citizens to his discretion. Only mores as pure as those of the ancient Romans could withstand censors; such tribunals would soon have overturned everything among us. It is for public esteem to differentiate between wicked and good men. The magistrate is judge only of strict entitlement; but the populace is the true judge of mores—an upright and even enlightened judge on this point, occasionally deceived but never corrupted. The ranks of citizens ought therefore to be regulated not on the basis of their personal merit, which would be to leave to the magistrate the freedom to make an almost arbitrary application of the law, but upon the real services that they render to the state and that lend themselves to a more precise reckoning.

___________________________

¹ [Politics, bk. 1, ch. 5, 1254a. Aristotle goes on to argue that it is natural that some should be slaves.]

² [Rousseau did not obtain (as he knew he should have) the republic’s permission before dedicating his book to it; he sent the council a copy of his book and received what he later described as “cold” thanks.]

³ [Rousseau dates his ambition to serve Geneva to the year he started work as an apprentice notary.]

⁴ [Rousseau follows Montesquieu in insisting that a republic must be limited in size.]

⁵ [According to the long tradition descending from Aristotle, democracy was, like tyranny and oligarchy, a perverted form of government. Few writers before Rousseau used the term in a favorable sense; and even he acknowledges that democracy must be “tempered.”]

⁶ [Rousseau probably has in mind the claim by the Dukes of Savoy to have sovereignty over Geneva, although he may also be thinking of the papacy’s claim to an overarching authority above all secular sovereigns.]

⁷ [This is an argument to be found in Machiavelli’s Discourses, bk. 1, ch. 16.]

⁸ [This was the case in Geneva.]

⁹ [In 1738, France had stepped in to mediate between conflicting democratic and oligarchic forces in Geneva and had underwritten the resulting compromise.]

¹⁰ [Rousseau’s word is industrie, but to translate this as “industry” would be misleading. The Dictionnaire de l’Académie française gives as its core meaning “dexterity or skill [adresse] in making something.” From here on, industrie is translated as “skills.”]

¹¹ [The implicit reference is to Matthew 15:6.]

¹² [Tacitus (AD 56–117), a Roman historian, was admired by lovers of liberty for his unsparing description of despotism. Plutarch (AD 46–120), a Greek historian, provided in his Lives an account of the key political leaders of ancient Greece and Rome. Since Rousseau is portraying his father as a model citizen and lover of liberty, it seems likely that the work of Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) that he has in mind is not On the Law of War and Peace (1625) or On the Truth of the Christian Religion (1627) but The Annals and History of the Affairs of the Low Countries, a history of the Protestant Dutch Revolt against Catholic Spain covering the period 1559–1609, published posthumously in Latin in 1657 and translated into French in 1662. Rousseau was thus raised by his father, he would have the reader understand, in the principles of both ancient and modern liberty.]

¹³ [The internal conflicts of 1734–1738 that led to French intervention.]

¹⁴ [The clergy.]

¹⁵ [This is an indirect blow against Jean Cauvin (John Calvin), who had Miguel Servet (Servetus) executed.]

¹⁶ [“Know thyself.”]

¹⁷ [Plato, Republic, bk. 10, 611c–d.]

¹⁸ [Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1694–1748), author of Principles of Natural Right (1747) and Principles of Political Right (1751).]

¹⁹ [Rousseau’s phrase is inégalité morale (inequality with regard to mores). There is no word in the French or English of Rousseau’s day for “culture” in the sense of the customs or way of life of a particular society. So it would be slightly anachronistic, but not misleading, to translate inégalité morale as “cultural inequality.”]

²⁰ [Persius, Satire 3, lines 71–73.]

²¹ [Rousseau’s phrase is inégalité morale; see note 19.]

²² [E.g., Hugo Grotius.]

²³ [E.g., John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, ch. 2, §4.]

²⁴ [E.g., Thomas Hobbes.]

²⁵ [The “facts” here are the history of humanity as recorded in the Bible.]

²⁶ [394–314 BC, a disciple of Plato.]

²⁷ [Judging from what Rousseau says later in the Discourse (“multiply the number of abortions,” p. 66), he would seem to have abortion in mind.]

²⁸ [The illustrious philosopher is Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws, bk. 1, ch. 2. Richard Cumberland is the author of a refutation of Hobbes, On the Laws of Nature (1672). Samuel Pufendorf (1632–1694) was widely regarded as the leading authority on the law of nature.]

²⁹ [Francisco Coreal (1648–1708) wrote an account of his voyages to the West Indies.]

³⁰ [Podalirius and Machaon are the sons of Asclepius, the god of medicine in ancient Greece. Celsus (c. 25 BC–c. AD 50) was the Roman author of a treatise on medicine. Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 BC) was regarded by the Greeks as the founder of medicine.]

³¹ [Jean Laët (1593–1646) published an account of the West Indies that was translated into French in 1650.]

³² [Rousseau’s major source for his knowledge of “savage man” is the General History of Voyages published by the Abbot Prévost in a multivolume series, of which the first eleven volumes appeared in 1746 and the twelfth in 1754.]

³³ [Rousseau places perfectibility in italics because it is a word of his own invention.]

³⁴ [Rousseau’s word arts includes the mechanical arts or technology; indeed, here it refers specifically to technology.]

³⁵ [The Eurotas runs through Sparta.]

³⁶ [Cf. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, bk. 18, ch. 4.]

³⁷ [Rousseau’s source is Jean Baptiste Du Tertre, General History of the Islands of St. Christophe [St. Kitts], Guadeloupe and Martinique (1654).]

³⁸ [Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–1780), Essay on the Origins of Human Knowledge (1746).]

³⁹ [Hobbes, De Cive, ch. 10, §1, and, here, Praefatio ad lectores.]

⁴⁰ [Justin, Historiae, bk. 2, ch. 2, §15, probably cited from Grotius, Law of War and Peace, bk. 2, ch. 2, §2.]

⁴¹ [Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), author of The Fable of the Bees (1714).]

⁴² [Mandeville, An Essay on Charity and Charity Schools, added to The Fable of the Bees in 1723.]

⁴³ [Juvenal, Satire 15, lines 131–33.]

⁴⁴ [Rousseau later said that this passage was suggested to him by Diderot.]

⁴⁵ [Voltaire, who believed that men and women are equal, wrote in the margin of his copy one word: “why?”]

⁴⁶ [Rousseau’s word is tempérament. The 1762 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française says, “On dit absolument, Avoir du tempérament, pour dire, Être fort porté à l’amour” (to have a very powerful sex drive).]

⁴⁷ [Rousseau’s phrase is les différents ordres de l’état civil. One might almost translate it as “the social classes of civilized society.”]

⁴⁸ [Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 4, ch. 3, §18.]

⁴⁹ [Grotius, Law of War and Peace, bk. 2, ch. 2, §2.]

⁵⁰ [Ovid, Metamorphoses, bk. 11, line 127.]

⁵¹ [In claiming that the worst that can happen is to be placed at the discretion of someone else, Rousseau is defending a classical conception of liberty against Hobbes, who had insisted that we are free unless we are prevented by force from doing as we wish.]

⁵² [La Fontaine, Fables, bk. 6, no. 8.]

⁵³ [Pliny, Panegyric of Trajan 55.]

⁵⁴ [Rousseau has misremembered an anecdote reported both by Herodotus (Histories 7.135) and Plutarch (Spartan Sayings, 235F).]

⁵⁵ [Tacitus, Histories, bk. 4, ch. 17; but Rousseau’s source is Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (1698), from which he made notes as he wrote the second Discourse.]

⁵⁶ [Both Locke and Sidney had written against the Patriarcha (1680) of Robert Filmer (1588–1653).]

⁵⁷ [Rousseau is quoting a note in Barbeyrac’s edition of Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations. Jean Barbeyrac (1674–1744) translated and edited Pufendorf, Grotius, and Cumberland.]

⁵⁸ [Pufendorf, Law of Nature and Nations, bk. 8, ch. 3, §1.]

⁵⁹ [A clear indication that Rousseau already had in mind the argument of the Social Contract.]

⁶⁰ [Lucan, Civil War 1.376.]

⁶¹ [Tacitus, quoted inaccurately by Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government §19.]

⁶² [Diogenes went around in broad daylight with a lighted lamp. When asked what he was doing, he would say that he was searching for a human being; his complaint was that he could find no human beings, only rascals and scoundrels.]

⁶³ [An inhabitant of the Caribbean.]

⁶⁴ [Here again Rousseau’s phrase is inégalité morale (inequality with regard to mores).]

⁶⁵ [Cf. Montaigne, Essays, bk. 1, ch. 30, “Of Cannibals.”]

⁶⁶ [Herodotus, Histories 3.67–84.]

⁶⁷ [Rousseau’s Discourse draws extensively on the work of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon (1707–1788). By 1754 Buffon had published the first four volumes of his Natural History.]

⁶⁸ [The cannon is a bone in the rear leg of a horse that joins the hock to the pastern.]

⁶⁹ [Since photosynthesis was not understood in the eighteenth century, theories of plant growth were necessarily very different from ours.]

⁷⁰ [Arabia Petraea is a region of Arabia whose capital is the city of Petra.]

⁷¹ [Dicaearchus (c. 350–c. 285 BC) was a Greek historian. Rousseau’s information comes secondhand from Jean Barbeyrac, whose editions of Pufendorf and Grotius provided Rousseau with an education in political philosophy.]

⁷² [Francisco (François) Coreal. Rousseau misspells his name.]

⁷³ [Peter Kolbe (1675–1726), whom Rousseau had read in Histoire générale des voyages (1746–), edited by Abbot Prévost; twelve volumes had appeared by 1754.]

⁷⁴ [Jean Baptiste Du Tertre (1610–1687).]

⁷⁵ [Rousseau’s word vorax here and below appears to mean “omnivorous,” but it is a little difficult to see what hens and hawks have in common.]

⁷⁶ [Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759), Essai de philosophie morale (1749).]

⁷⁷ [The great fire of 1666, which destroyed much of the City of London.]

⁷⁸ [Essays, bk. 1, ch. 22.]

⁷⁹ [Rousseau has in mind castration. Castrati sang in Italian choirs, and eunuchs were entrusted with the care of female slaves in the Ottoman empire.]

⁸⁰ [This passage is notoriously difficult to interpret. Rousseau appears to be attributing to his adversaries his own view, that human beings would be better off without modern civilization, and claiming for himself the view that religion (symbolized by God’s command to Adam and Eve not to eat of the tree of knowledge) requires the preservation of the existing social order, even though he concludes by insisting that he will continue to despise it. The obvious explanation is that Rousseau is trying to placate the censor.]

⁸¹ [Herodotus and Ctesias were ancient Greek historians of Persia.]

⁸² [Andrew Battel (c. 1565–c. 1640), an English traveler and trader.]

⁸³ [In Ethiopia.]

⁸⁴ [Gorillas, orangutans, and chimpanzees were not reliably distinguished in Rousseau’s day. Buffon thought pongo, jocko, and enjoko were other names for orangutan.]

⁸⁵ [Samuel Purchas (c. 1575–1626), who published histories of voyages.]

⁸⁶ [Olfert Dapper (d. 1690), a Dutch geographer who wrote a description of Africa, translated into French in 1668.]

⁸⁷ [Girolamo Merolla, who published an account of the Congo in 1692.]

⁸⁸ [The experiment Rousseau has in mind is to breed between humans and orangutans on the assumption that, if they belong to different species, any offspring will be sterile, as mules are.]

⁸⁹ [In the copy of the Discourse sent to Richard Davenport, Rousseau inserts here “or perhaps happily.”]

⁹⁰ [In 1736 Charles-Marie de La Condamine (1701–1774) had measured three degrees of the earth’s circumference in Ecuador, while at the same time Maupertuis measured one degree in Lapland. These measurements helped confirm Newtonianism by showing that the earth was not spherical.]

⁹¹ [Engelbrecht Kaempfer (1651–1716), whose account of Japan appears in Kolbe’s Histoire générale des voyages.]

⁹² [The Patagonians were supposed to be giants, but many doubted the reliability of these reports.]

⁹³ [I.e., we may doubt whether they are intelligent enough to be properly human.]

⁹⁴ [The excerpted passage is from the original English text of Locke’s Two Treatises, 2, ch. 7, §79–80.]

⁹⁵ [Rousseau’s phrase is preuves morales. According to the language of the day, a “moral proof” is the sort of certainty we express when we say, “Tom would never do that” because we know his character and what he is capable of.]

⁹⁶ [Rousseau’s phrase is matière de physique, but according to eighteenth-century dictionaries, physique includes all aspects of the study of nature. According to scholastic and Cartesian philosophy, proofs in the natural sciences should be demonstrations from first principles, as in geometry.]

⁹⁷ [Rousseau here quotes the Latin text.]

⁹⁸ [Isaac Vossius (1618–1689), a Dutch scholar, worked briefly for Queen Christina of Sweden and then settled in England.]

⁹⁹ [Palamedes, in Greek mythology, was responsible for involving Odysseus in the Trojan War. He was believed to have invented dice, backgammon, and numbers.]

¹⁰⁰ [Louis-Hector, Duke of Villars (1653–1734).]

¹⁰¹ [Isocrates (436–338 BC) was a leading Athenian rhetorician.]