overnment is so much dissolved by
despotism, that the despot is no longer master than he continues the
strongest, and that, as soon as his slaves can expel him, they may do
it without his having the least right to complain of their using him
ill. The insurrection, which ends in the death or despotism of a
sultan, is as juridical an act as any by which the day before he
disposed of the lives and fortunes of his subjects. Force alone upheld
him, force alone overturns him. Thus all things take place and succeed
in their natural order; and whatever may be the upshot of these hasty
and frequent revolutions, no one man has reason to complain of
another's injustice, but only of his own indiscretion or bad fortune.

By thus discovering and following the lost and forgotten tracks, by
which man from the natural must have arrived at the civil state; by
restoring, with the intermediate positions which I have been just
indicating, those which want of leisure obliges me to suppress, or
which my imagination has not suggested, every attentive reader must
unavoidably be struck at the immense space which separates these two
states. 'Tis in this slow succession of things he may meet with the
solution of an infinite number of problems in morality and politics,
which philosophers are puzzled to solve. He will perceive that, the
mankind of one age not being the mankind of another, the reason why
Diogenes could not find a man was, that he sought among his
cotemporaries the man of an earlier period: Cato, he will then see,
fell with Rome and with liberty, because he did not suit the age in
which he lived; and the greatest of men served only to astonish that
world, which would have cheerfully obeyed him, had he come into it
five hundred years earlier. In a word, he will find himself in a
condition to understand how the soul and the passions of men by
insensible alterations change as it were their nature; how it comes to
pass, that at the long run our wants and our pleasures change objects;
that, original man vanishing by degrees, society no longer offers to
our inspection but an assemblage of artificial men and factitious
passions, which are the work of all these new relations, and have no
foundation in nature. Reflection teaches us nothing on that head, but
what experience perfectly confirms. Savage man and civilised man
differ so much at bottom in point of inclinations and passions, that
what constitutes the supreme happiness of the one would