Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which precedes in him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares with some of the brutes.  Mandeville, who was forced to admit the existence of this admirable quality in man, was absurd in not perceiving that from it flow all the social virtues which he would fain deny.  Pity is more energetic in the primitive condition than it is among ourselves.  It is reflection which isolates one.  It is philosophy which teaches the philosopher to say secretly at sight of a suffering wretch, Perish if it please thee; I am safe and sound.  They may be butchering a fellow-creature under your window; all you have to do is to clap your hands to your ears, and argue a little with yourself to hinder nature in revolt from making you feel as if you were in the case of the victim.[182] The savage man has not got this odious gift.  In the state of nature it is pity that takes the place of laws, manners, and virtue.  It is in this natural sentiment rather than in subtle arguments that we have to seek the reluctance that every man would feel to do ill, even without the precepts of education.[183]

Finally, the passion of love, which produces such disasters in a state of society, where the jealousy of lovers and the vengeance of husbands lead each day to duels and murders, where the duty of eternal fidelity only serves to occasion adulteries, and where the law of continence necessarily extends the debauching of women and the practice of procuring abortion[184]—­this passion in a state of nature, where it is purely physical, momentary, and without any association of durable sentiment with the object of it, simply leads to the necessary reproduction of the species and nothing more.

“Let us conclude, then, that wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without habitation, without war, without connection of any kind, without any need of his fellows or without any desire to harm them, perhaps even without ever recognising one of them individually, savage man, subject to few passions and sufficing to himself, had only the sentiments and the enlightenment proper to his condition.  He was only sensible of his real wants, and only looked because he thought he had an interest in seeing; and his intelligence made no more progress than his vanity.  If by chance he hit on some discovery, he was all the less able to communicate it; as he did not know even his own children.  An art perished with its inventor.  There was neither education nor progress; generations multiplied uselessly; and as each generation always started from the same point, centuries glided away in all the rudeness of the first ages, the race was already old, the individual remained always a child.”

This brings us to the point of the matter.  For if you compare the prodigious diversities in education and manner of life which reign in the different orders of the civil condition, with the simplicity and uniformity of the savage and animal life, where all find nourishment in the same articles of food, live in the same way, and do exactly the same things, you will easily understand to what degree the difference between man and man must be less in the state of nature than in that of society.[185] Physical inequality is hardly perceived in the state of nature, and its indirect influences there are almost non-existent.