e essay did not establish
even a plausible case, but it was paradoxical and suggestive, and
attracted more attention than Turgot's thoughtful discourse in the
Sorbonne. D'Alembert deemed it worthy of a courteous expression of
dissent; [Footnote: In the Disc. Prel. to the Encyclopaedia.] and
Voltaire satirised it in his Timon.

2.

In the Discourse on Inequality Rousseau dealt more directly with the
effect of civilisation on happiness. He proposed to explain how it came
about that right overcame the primitive reign of might, that the strong
were induced to serve the weak, and the people to purchase a fancied
tranquillity at the price of a real felicity. So he stated his problem;
and to solve it he had to consider the "state of nature" which Hobbes
had conceived as a state of war and Locke as a state of peace. Rousseau
imagines our first savage ancestors living in isolation, wandering in
the forests, occasionally co-operating, and differing from the animals
only by the possession of a faculty for improving themselves (la faculte
de se perfectionner). After a stage in which families lived alone in
a more or less settled condition, came the formation of groups of
families, living together in a definite territory, united by a common
mode of life and sustenance, and by the common influence of climate, but
without laws or government or any social organisation.

It is this state, which was reached only after a long period, not the
original state of nature, that Rousseau considers to have been the
happiest period of the human race.

This period of the development of human faculties, holding a just mean
between the indolence of the primitive state and the petulant activity
of our self-love, must be the happiest and most durable epoch. The more
we reflect on it, the more we find that this state was the least exposed
to revolutions and the best for man; and that he can have left it only
through some fatal chance which, for the common advantage, should never
have occurred. The example of the savages who have almost all been found
in this state seems to bear out the conclusion that humanity was made to
remain in it for ever, that it was the true youth of the world, and that
all further progresses have been so many steps, apparently towards the
perfection of the individual, and really towards the decrepitude of the
species.

He ascribes to metallurgy and agriculture the fatal resolution which
brought this Arcadian existence to a