But if the difficulties which surround all these questions leave some room for contesting this difference between man and animal , there is another very particular quality which distinguishes them and about which there can be no dispute - that is the faculty of self - perfecting , a faculty which , with the help of circumstances , develops all the others in succession , and which resides among us , as much in the species as in the individual , whereas an animal is , at the end of several months , what it will be all its life , and its species at the end of a thousand years will be what it was during the first year of this millenium . Why is man the only one subject to becoming a dotard ? Is it not because that is when he returns to his primitive condition and that , while the beast , which has acquired nothing and has in addition nothing to lose , always remains with his instinct , when man loses by old age or other accidents everything which his perfectibility has led him to acquire , he falls back in this way even lower than a beast ? It would be sad for us to be forced to concur that this distinctive faculty which is almost boundless , is the source of all the misfortunes of man , that it is what pulls him by the power of time out of this original condition in which he would flow through quiet and innocent days , that with the passage of centuries it is what hatches his enlightenment and his errors , his vices and his virtues , AND MAKES HIM AT LENGTH A TYRANT OVER HIMSELF AND NATURE J.J. Rousseau Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men oneeyedman.net/school-archive/classes/fulltext/mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/rousseau/seconddiscourse.htm
Posted on: Sun, 01 Dec 2013 04:50:52 +0000
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