People think only of preserving their child’s life; this is not enough, he must be taught to preserve his own life when he is a man, to bear the buffets of fortune, to brave wealth and poverty, to live at need among the snows of Iceland or on the scorching rocks of Malta.  In vain you guard against death; he must needs die; and even if you do not kill him with your precautions, they are mistaken.  Teach him to live rather than to avoid death:  life is not breath, but action, the use of our senses, our mind, our faculties, every part of ourselves which makes us conscious of our being.  Life consists less in length of days than in the keen sense of living.  A man maybe buried at a hundred and may never have lived at all.  He would have fared better had he died young.

Our wisdom is slavish prejudice, our customs consist in control, constraint, compulsion.  Civilised man is born and dies a slave.  The infant is bound up in swaddling clothes, the corpse is nailed down in his coffin.  All his life long man is imprisoned by our institutions.

I am told that many midwives profess to improve the shape of the infant’s head by rubbing, and they are allowed to do it.  Our heads are not good enough as God made them, they must be moulded outside by the nurse and inside by the philosopher.  The Caribs are better off than we are.  The child has hardly left the mother’s womb, it has hardly begun to move and stretch its limbs, when it is deprived of its freedom.  It is wrapped in swaddling bands, laid down with its head fixed, its legs stretched out, and its arms by its sides; it is wound round with linen and bandages of all sorts so that it cannot move.  It is fortunate if it has room to breathe, and it is laid on its side so that water which should flow from its mouth can escape, for it is not free to turn its head on one side for this purpose.

The new-born child requires to stir and stretch his limbs to free them from the stiffness resulting from being curled up so long.  His limbs are stretched indeed, but he is not allowed to move them.  Even the head is confined by a cap.  One would think they were afraid the child should look as if it were alive.

Thus the internal impulses which should lead to growth find an insurmountable obstacle in the way of the necessary movements.  The child exhausts his strength in vain struggles, or he gains strength very slowly.  He was freer and less constrained in the womb; he has gained nothing by birth.

The inaction, the constraint to which the child’s limbs are subjected can only check the circulation of the blood and humours; it can only hinder the child’s growth in size and strength, and injure its constitution.  Where these absurd precautions are absent, all the men are tall, strong, and well-made.  Where children are swaddled, the country swarms with the hump-backed, the lame, the bow-legged, the rickety, and every kind of deformity.  In our fear lest the body should become deformed by free movement, we hasten to deform it by putting it in a press.  We make our children helpless lest they should hurt themselves.