o dispute on this difference between
man and beast, there is another very specific quality that
distinguishes them, and a quality which will admit of no dispute; this
is the faculty of improvement; a faculty which, as circumstances
offer, successively unfolds all the other faculties, and resides among
us not only in the species, but in the individuals that compose it;
whereas a beast is, at the end of some months, all he ever will be
during the rest of his life; and his species, at the end of a thousand
years, precisely what it was the first year of that long period. Why
is man alone subject to dotage? Is it not, because he thus returns to
his primitive condition? And because, while the beast, which has
acquired nothing and has likewise nothing to lose, continues always in
possession of his instinct, man, losing by old age, or by accident,
all the acquisitions he had made in consequence of his perfectibility,
thus falls back even lower than beasts themselves? It would be a
melancholy necessity for us to be obliged to allow, that this
distinctive and almost unlimited faculty is the source of all man's
misfortunes; that it is this faculty, which, though by slow degrees,
draws them out of their original condition, in which his days would
slide away insensibly in peace and innocence; that it is this faculty,
which, in a succession of ages, produces his discoveries and mistakes,
his virtues and his vices, and, at long run, renders him both his own
and nature's tyrant. It would be shocking to be obliged to commend, as
a beneficent being, whoever he was that first suggested to the
_Oronoco_ Indians the use of those boards which they bind on the
temples of their children, and which secure to them the enjoyment of
some part at least of their natural imbecility and happiness.

Savage man, abandoned by nature to pure instinct, or rather
indemnified for that which has perhaps been denied to him by faculties
capable of immediately supplying the place of it, and of raising him
afterwards a great deal higher, would therefore begin with functions
that were merely animal: to see and to feel would be his first
condition, which he would enjoy in common with other animals. To will
and not to will, to wish and to fear, would be the first, and in a
manner, the only operations of his soul, till new circumstances
occasioned new developments.

Let moralists say what they will, the human understanding is greatly
indebted to the passions, which