| | 1 | Author: | Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1712-1778 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of The Inequality Among Mankind  | | | | Published: | 2002 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | 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. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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