Chapter 2

DISCOURSE FIRST PART

However important it may be, in order to form a proper judgment of the
natural state of man, to consider him from his origin, and to examine
him, as it were, in the first embryo of the species; I shall not
attempt to trace his organization through its successive approaches to
perfection: I shall not stop to examine in the animal system what he
might have been in the beginning, to become at last what he actually
is; I shall not inquire whether, as Aristotle thinks, his neglected
nails were no better at first than crooked talons; whether his whole
body was not, bear-like, thick covered with rough hair; and whether,
walking upon all-fours, his eyes, directed to the earth, and confined
to a horizon of a few paces extent, did not at once point out the
nature and limits of his ideas. I could only form vague, and almost
imaginary, conjectures on this subject. Comparative anatomy has not as
yet been sufficiently improved; neither have the observations of
natural philosophy been sufficiently ascertained, to establish upon
such foundations the basis of a solid system. For this reason, without
having recourse to the supernatural informations with which we have
been favoured on this head, or paying any attention to the changes,
that must have happened in the conformation of the interior and
exterior parts of man's body, in proportion as he applied his members
to new purposes, and took to new aliments, I shall suppose his
conformation to have always been, what we now behold it; that he
always walked on two feet, made the same use of his hands that we do
of ours, extended his looks over the whole face of nature, and
measured with his eyes the vast extent of the heavens.

If I strip this being, thus constituted, of all the supernatural gifts
which he may have received, and of all the artificial faculties, which
we could not have acquired but by slow degrees; if I consider him, in
a word, such as he must have issued from the hands of nature; I see an
animal less strong than some, and less active than others, but, upon
the whole, the most advantageously organized of any; I see him
satisfying the calls of hunger under the first oak, and those of
thirst at the first rivulet; I see him laying himself down to sleep at
the foot of the same tree that afforded him his meal; and behold, this
done, all his wants are completely supplied.

The earth left to its own natural fertility and covered with immense
woods, that no hatchet ever disfigured, offers at every step food and
shelter to every species of animals. Men, dispersed among them,
observe and imitate their industry, and thus rise to the instinct of
beasts; with this advantage, that, whereas every species of beasts is
confined to one