Now as all the social virtues and other faculties possessed by man potentially were not bound by anything inherent in him to develop into actuality, he might have remained to all eternity in his admirable and most fitting primitive condition, but for the fortuitous concurrence of a variety of external changes.  What are these different changes, which may perhaps have perfected human reason, while they certainly have deteriorated the race, and made men bad in making them sociable?

What, then, are the intermediary facts between the state of nature and the state of civil society, the nursery of inequality?  What broke up the happy uniformity of the first times?  First, difference in soil, in climate, in seasons, led to corresponding differences in men’s manner of living.  Along the banks of rivers and on the shores of the sea, they invented hooks and lines, and were eaters of fish.  In the forests they invented bows and arrows, and became hunters.  In cold countries they covered themselves with the skins of beasts.  Lightning, volcanoes, or some happy chance acquainted them with fire, a new protection against the rigours of winter.  In company with these natural acquisitions, grew up a sort of reflection or mechanical prudence, which showed them the kind of precautions most necessary to their security.  From this rudimentary and wholly egoistic reflection there came a sense of the existence of a similar nature and similar interests in their fellow-creatures.  Instructed by experience that the love of well-being and comfort is the only motive of human actions, the savage united with his neighbours when union was for their joint convenience, and did his best to blind and outwit his neighbours when their interests were adverse to his own, and he felt himself the weaker.  Hence the origin of certain rude ideas of mutual obligation.[186]

Soon, ceasing to fall asleep under the first tree, or to withdraw into caves, they found axes of hard stone, which served them to cut wood, to dig the ground, and to construct hovels of branches and clay.  This was the epoch of a first revolution, which formed the establishment and division of families, and which introduced a rough and partial sort of property.  Along with rudimentary ideas of property, though not connected with them, came the rudimentary forms of inequality.  When men were thrown more together, then he who sang or danced the best, the strongest, the most adroit, or the most eloquent, acquired the most consideration—­that is, men ceased to take uniform and equal place.  And with the coming of this end of equality there passed away the happy primitive immunity from jealousy, envy, malice, hate.