his dog, his horse, his slave. He overturns everything,
disfigures everything; he loves deformity, monsters; he desires that
nothing should be as nature made it, not even man himself. To please
him, man must be broken in like a horse; man must be adapted to man's
own fashion, like a tree in his garden.[1]

Were it not for all this, matters would be still worse. No one wishes
to be a half-developed being; and in the present condition of things, a
man left to himself among others from his birth would be the most
deformed among them all. Prejudices, authority, necessities, example,
all the social institutions in which we are submerged, would stifle
nature in him, and would put nothing in its place. In such a man
nature would be like a shrub sprung up by chance in the midst of a
highway, and jostled from all sides, bent in every direction, by the
passers-by.

Plants are improved by cultivation, and men by education. If man were
born large and strong, his size and strength would be useless to him
until he had learned to use them. They would be prejudicial to him, by
preventing others from thinking of assisting him; and left to himself
he would die of wretchedness before he had known his own necessities.
We pity the state of infancy; we do not perceive that the human race
would have perished if man had not begun by being a child.

We are born weak, we need strength; we are born destitute of all
things, we need assistance; we are born stupid, we need judgment. All
that we have not at our birth, and that we need when grown up, is given
us by education.

This education comes to us from nature itself, or from other men, or
from circumstances. The internal development of our faculties and of
our organs is the education nature gives us; the use we are taught to
make of this development is the education we get from other men; and
what we learn, by our own experience, about things that interest as, is
the education of circumstances.

Each of us is therefore formed by three kinds of teachers. The pupil
in whom their different lessons contradict one another is badly
educated, and will never be in harmony with himself; the one in whom
they all touch upon the same points and tend toward the same object
advances toward that goal only, and lives accordingly. He alone is
well educated.

Now of these three different educations, that of nature does not depend
upon us; that of circumstances depends upon us only in certain
r