Chapter 1 - Page 2

without troubling their heads to prove, that he
really must have had such ideas, or even that such ideas were useful
to him: others have spoken of the natural right of every man to keep
what belongs to him, without letting us know what they meant by the
word belong; others, without further ceremony ascribing to the
strongest an authority over the weakest, have immediately struck out
government, without thinking of the time requisite for men to form any
notion of the things signified by the words authority and government.
All of them, in fine, constantly harping on wants, avidity,
oppression, desires and pride, have transferred to the state of nature
ideas picked up in the bosom of society. In speaking of savages they
described citizens. Nay, few of our own writers seem to have so much
as doubted, that a state of nature did once actually exit; though it
plainly appears by Sacred History, that even the first man,
immediately furnished as he was by God himself with both instructions
and precepts, never lived in that state, and that, if we give to the
books of Moses that credit which every Christian philosopher ought to
give to them, we must deny that, even before the deluge, such a state
ever existed among men, unless they fell into it by some extraordinary
event: a paradox very difficult to maintain, and altogether impossible
to prove.

Let us begin therefore, by laying aside facts, for they do not affect
the question. The researches, in which we may engage on this occasion,
are not to be taken for historical truths, but merely as hypothetical
and conditional reasonings, fitter to illustrate the nature of things,
than to show their true origin, like those systems, which our
naturalists daily make of the formation of the world. Religion
commands us to believe, that men, having been drawn by God himself out
of a state of nature, are unequal, because it is his pleasure they
should be so; but religion does not forbid us to draw conjectures
solely from the nature of man, considered in itself, and from that of
the beings which surround him, concerning the fate of mankind, had
they been left to themselves. This is then the question I am to
answer, the question I propose to examine in the present discourse. As
mankind in general have an interest in my subject, I shall endeavour
to use a language suitable to all nations; or rather, forgetting the
circumstances of time and place in order to think of nothing but the
men I speak to, I shall suppose myself in the Lyceum of Athens,
repeating the lessons of my masters before the Platos and the
Xenocrates of that famous seat of philosophy as my judges, and in
presence of the whole human species as my audience.

O man, whatever country you may belong to, whatever your