which has been proved, but which must be often repeated. It is a little extraordinary, that we should have harassed an innocent, estimable man of our time, the good Helvetius, for having said, that if men had not hands, they could not build houses and work tapestry. Apparently, those who have condemned this proposition, have discovered a secret for cutting stones and wood, and working at the needle with their feet. I liked the author of the work "On Mind." This man was worth more than all his enemies together; but I never approved either the errors of his book, or the trivial truths which he so emphatically enforced I have, however, boldly taken his part when absurd men have condemned him for these same truths. he is more active; and having all his organs stronger, he is more capable of a fixed attention. All arts have been invented by him, and not by woman. We should remark, that it is not the fire or imagination, but persevering meditation and combination of ideas which have invented arts, as mechanics, gunpowder, printing, dialling, &c. Mankind alone knows that it must die, and knows it only by experience. A child brought up alone, and transported into a desert island, would dream of death no more than a plant or a cat. A singular man has written, that the human body is a fruit, which is green until old age, and that the moment of death is that of maturity. A strange maturity, ashes and putrefaction! The head of this philosopher was not ripe. How many extravagances has the rage for telling novelties produced? I have no terms to express the excess of my contempt for those who, for example sake, would magisterially proscribe The principal occupations of our race this passage:-"The Turks can only be are the provision of food, lodging, and considered deists." How then, pedant! clothing; all the rest are nearly acceswould you have them regarded as athe-sary; and it is this poor accessary which ists, because they adore only one God! has produced so many ravages and murders. You condemn this other proposition, "The man of sense knows that men are what they must be; that all hatred against them is unjust; that a fool commits fooleries as a wild stock bears bitter fruits." So, crabbed stocks of the schools, you persecute a man because he hates you not! Let us, however, leave the schools, and pursue our subject. Reason, industrious hands, a head capable of generalising ideas, a language pliant enough to express them, these are great benefits granted by the Supreme Being to man, to the exclusion of other animals. The male in general lives rather a shorter time than the female. He is also generally larger in proportion. A man of the loftiest stature is commonly two or three inches higher than the tallest woman. His strength is almost always superior; Different Races of Men. We have elsewhere seen how many different races of men this globe contains, and to what degrees the first negro and the first white who met, were astonished at one another. It is likely enough, that several weakly species of men and animals have perished. It is thus that we no longer discover any of the murex, of which the species has probably been devoured by other animals who several ages after visited the shores inhabited by this little shell-fish. St. Jerome, in his History of the Father of the Desert, speaks of a centaur who had a conversation with St. Anthony the Hermit. He afterwards gives an account of a much longer discourse that the sam Anthony had with a satyr. St. Augustin, in his thirty-third sermon, addressed "To his Brothers in the Desert," tells things as extraordinary as Jerome. "I was already Bishop of Neither can you make good grenadiers. Hippo, when I went into Ethiopia with of a poor Darian or an Albinois. It is some servants of Christ, there to preach not because they have partridge eyes, or the gospel. In this country we saw many that their hair and eyebrows are like the men and women without heads, who had { finest and whitest silk; but it is because two great eyes in their breasts. In coun- their bodies, and consequently their tries still more southerly, we saw a people courage, partake of the most extreme who had but one eye in their foreheads," weakness. There is none but a blind &c. man, and even an obstinate blind man, Apparently, Augustin and Jerome then who can deny the existence of all these spoke with economy;' they augmented { different species. It is as great and rethe works of creation, to raise greater ad-markable as that of apes. miration of the works of God. They sought to astonish men by fables, to render them more submissive to the yoke of faith. We can be very good Christians without believing in centaurs, men without heads, or with only one eye, one leg, &c. But can we doubt that the interior structure of a negro may be different to that of a white, since the mucous netted membrane beneath the skin is white in the one, and black in the other? I have already told you so, but you are deaf. That all Races of Men have constantly lived in Society. Ali the men whom we have discovered in the most uncultivated and frightful countries, herd together like beavers, ants, bees, and several others species of animals. We have never seen countries in which they lived separate; or in which the male only joined with the female by chance, and abandoned her the moment after in disgust; or in which the mother estranged herself from her children, after having brought them up; or in which human beings lived without family and society. The Albinois and the Darians-the first originally of Africa, and the second of the middle of America-are as different from us as from the negroes. There are yel-Some poor jesters have abused their unlow, red, and grey races. We have al-derstandings so far, as to hazard the asready seen, that all the Americans are without beards or hair on their bodies, except the head and eyebrows. All are equally men, but only as a fir, an oak, and a pear tree are equally trees; the pear tree comes not from the fir, nor the fir from the oak. tonishing paradox, that man is originally created to live alone, and that it is society which has depraved his nature. They might as well say, that herrings were created to swim alone in the sea; and that it is by an excess of corruption, that they pass in a troop from the Frozen Ocean to our shores; that formerly cranes flew in the air singly, and that, by a violation of their natural instinct, they have subsequently chosen to travel in company. Every animal has its instinct, and the instinct of man, fortified by reason, disposes him towards society, as towards eating and drinking. So far from the want of society having degraded man, it is estrangement from society which degrades him. Whoever lived absolutely alone, would soon lose the faculty of thinking and expressing himself; he would be a burden to himself, and its would only remain to metamorphose him into a beast. An excess of powerless pride, which rises up against the pride of others, may induce a melancholy man to fly from his fellows; but it is a species of depravity, and punishes itself. That pride is its own punishment, which frets itself into solitude and secretly resents being despised and forgotten. It is enduring the most horrible slavery, in order to be free. mother redoubles her love for him from whom she has received the germ of a being similar to himself. The instinct of the colliers of the Black Forest speaks to them as loudly, and animates them as strongly in favour of their children, as the instinct of pigeons and nightingales induces them to feed their little ones. Time has therefore been sadly lost in writing these abominable absurdities. The great fault of all these paradoxical We have enlarged the bounds of ordi-books lies in always supposing nature nary folly so far as to say, that it is not very different from what it is. If the natural for a man to be attached to a satires on man and woman written by woman during the nine months of her Boileau were not pleasantries, they would pregnancy. The appetite is satisfied says sin in the essential point of supposing all the author of these paradoxes; the man men fools and all women coquettes. has no longer any want of woman, nor the woman of man; and the latter need not have the least care, nor perhaps the least idea of the effects of the transient intercourse. They go different ways, and there is no appearance, until the end of nine months, that they have ever been known to one another. Why should he help her after her delivery? Why assist to bring up a child whom he cannot instinctively know belongs to him alone? The same author, an enemy to society, like the fox without a tail who would have his companions cut off theirs, thus in a magisterial style expresses himself: "The first who, having enclosed an estate, took upon himself to say-This is mine-and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of society. What crimes, wars, murders, miseries, and horrors, might have been spared to mankind, if some one, seizing All this is execrable; but happily no- the stakes, or filling up the pit, had cried thing is more false. If this barbarous to his companions Take care how you indifference was the true instinct of na- listen to this impostor; you are lost if ture, mankind would always have acted you forget that the fruits are common to thus. Instinct is unchangeable, its in-all, and that the earth belongs to noconsistences are very rare; the father body!" would always abandon the mother, and the mother would abandon her child. There would have been much fewer men on earth than voracious animals; for the wild beasts better provided and better armed, have a more prompt instinct, more sure means of living, and a more certain nourishment than mankind. Our nature is very different from the frightful romance which this man, possessed of the devil, has made of it. Except some barbarous souls entirely brutish, or perhaps a philosopher more brutal still, the roughest man, by a prevailing instinct, loves the child which is not yet born, the womb which bears it; and the Thus, according to this fine philosopher, a thief, a destroyer, would have been the benefactor of mankind, and we should punish an honest man who says to his children, "Let us imitate our neighbour;" he has enclosed his field, the beasts will no longer ravage it, his land will become more fertile; let us work ours as he has laboured his; it will aid us, and we shall improve it. Each family cultivating its own enclosure, we shall be better fed, more healthy, more peaceable, and less unhappy. We will endeavour to establish a distributive justice, which will console our unhappy race; and we shall be raised above the foxes and polecats, to whom this babbler would compare us." Would not this discourse be more sensible and honest, than that of the savage fool who would destroy the good man's orchard? What philosophy therefore is that which says things that common sense disclaims from China to Canada? Is it not that of a beggar, who would have all the rich robbed by the poor, in order that fraternal union might be better established among men? elevated beyond men in the scale of goodness. We see a hundred brothers enemies to each other, to one Clytem nestra. There are professions which necessarily render the soul pitiless-that of the soldier, the butcher, the officer of justice, and the jailor; and all trades which are founded on the annoyance of others. The officer, the soldier, the jailor, for example, are only happy in making others miserable. It is true, they are necessary against malefactors, and so far useful to It is true, that if all the hedges, forests, society; but of a thousand men of the and plains, were covered with wholesome kind, there is not one who acts from the and delicious fruits, it would be impos-motive of the public good, or who even sible, unjust, and ridiculous, to guard reflects that it is a public good. them. If there are any islands in which nature produces food and all necessaries without trouble, let us go and live there, far from the trash of our laws; but as soon as you have peopled them, we must return to meum and tuum, and to laws which are very often very bad, but which we cannot rationally do away. Is Man born Wicked? Is it not demonstrated, that man is not born perverse and the child of the devil? If such was his nature, he would commit enormous crimes and barbarities as soon as he could walk; he would use the first knife he could find, to wound whoever displeased him. He would necessarily resemble little wolves and foxes, who bite as soon as they can. On the contrary, throughout the world, he partakes of the nature of the lamb, while he is an infant. Why therefore, and how is it, that he so often becomes a wolf and fox? Is it not that, being born neither good nor wicked, education, example, the government into which he is thrown-in short, occasion of every kind -determines him to virtue or vice? Perhaps human nature could not be otherwise. Man could not always have false thoughts, nor always true affections; be always sweet, or always cruel. It is demonstrable, that woman is It is above all a curious thing to hear them speak of their prowess as they count the number of their victims; their snares to entrap them, the ills which they have made them suffer, and the money which they have got by it. Whoever has been able to descend to the subaltern detail of the bar-whoever has only heard lawyers reason familiarly among themselves, and applaud themselves for the miseries of their clients— must have a very poor opinion of human nature. There are more frightful professions still, which are however canvassed for like a canonship. There are some which change an honest man into a rogue, and which accustom him to lie in spite of himself, to deceive almost without perceiving it, to put a blind before the eyes of others, to prostrate himself by the interest and vanity of his situation, and without remorse to plunge mankind into stupid blindness. Women, incessantly occupied with the education of their children, and shut up in their domestic cares, are excluded from all these professions, which pervert human nature and render it atrocious. They are everywhere less barbarous than men. Physics join with morals to prevent them from great crimes; their blood is milder; they are less addicted to strong liquors, which inspire ferocity. An Iroquois, since they knew how to light It appears, therefore, that our customs and habits have rendered the male species very wicked. quire ages to arrive at these two arts. If this truth was general and without exceptions, the species would be more horrible than spiders, wolves, and pole-beavers would be infinitely preferable. cats, are to our eyes. But happily, professions which harden the heart and fill it with odious passions, are very rare. Observe, that in a nation of twenty millions, there are at most two hundred thousand soldiers. This is but one soldier to two hundred individuals. These two hundred thousand soldiers are held in the most severe discipline, and there are among them very honest people, who return to their villages and finish their old age as good fathers and husbands. Man would then be only precisely like a robust child; and we have seen many men who are not much above that state, as it is. The Laplanders, the Samoyeds, the inhabitants of Kamschatka, the Caffres, and Hottentots, are-with respect to man in a state of pure nature-that which the courts of Cyrus and Semiramis were in comparison with the inhabitants of the Cevennes. Yet the inhabitants of Kamschatka and the Hottentots of our The number of other trades which are days, so superior to men entirely savage, dangerous to manners, is but small. are animals who live six months of the Labourers, artisans and artists, are too year in caverns, where they eat the vermuch occupied often to deliver them-min by which they are eaten. selves up to crime. The earth will always bear detestable wretches, and books will always exaggerate the number, which, rather than being greater, is less than we say. If mankind had been under the empire of the devil, there would be no longer any person upon earth. In general, mankind is not above two or three degrees more civilised than the Kamschatkans. The multitude of brute beasts called men, compared with the little number of those who think, is at least in the proportion of an hundred to one in many nations. It is pleasant to contemplate on one Let us console ourselves: we have side, father Malebranche, who treats seen, and we shall always see, fine minds familiarly of the Word;' and on the from Pekin to la Rochelle; and what-other, these millions of animals similar ever licentiates and batchelors may say, to him, who have never heard speak the Tituses, Trajans, Antoninuses, and of the Word,' and who have not one Peter Bayles, were very honest men. metaphysical idea. Of Man in the State of pure Nature. What man would be in the state which we call that of pure nature? An animal much below the first Iroquois whom we found in the north of America. He would be very inferior to these Between men of pure instinct, and men of genius, floats this immense number occupied solely with subsisting. This subsistence costs us so much pains, that in the north of America an image of God often runs five or six leagues to get a dinner; whilst among |