the same
time that they increase the difficulty of satisfying such appetite,
men, in a state of nature, must be subject to fewer and less violent
fits of that passion, and of course there must be fewer and less
violent disputes among them in consequence of it. The imagination
which causes so many ravages among us, never speaks to the heart of
savages, who peaceably wait for the impulses of nature, yield to these
impulses without choice and with more pleasure than fury; and whose
desires never outlive their necessity for the thing desired.

Nothing therefore can be more evident, than that it is society alone,
which has added even to love itself as well as to all the other
passions, that impetuous ardour, which so often renders it fatal to
mankind; and it is so much the more ridiculous to represent savages
constantly murdering each other to glut their brutality, as this
opinion is diametrically opposite to experience, and the Caribbeans,
the people in the world who have as yet deviated least from the state
of nature, are to all intents and purposes the most peaceable in their
amours, and the least subject to jealousy, though they live in a
burning climate which seems always to add considerably to the activity
of these passions.

As to the inductions which may be drawn, in respect to several species
of animals, from the battles of the males, who in all seasons cover
our poultry yards with blood, and in spring particularly cause our
forests to ring again with the noise they make in disputing their
females, we must begin by excluding all those species, where nature
has evidently established, in the relative power of the sexes,
relations different from those which exist among us: thus from the
battle of cocks we can form no induction that will affect the human
species. In the species, where the proportion is better observed,
these battles must be owing entirely to the fewness of the females
compared with the males, or, which is all one, to the exclusive
intervals, during which the females constantly refuse the addresses of
the males; for if the female admits the male but two months in the
year, it is all the same as if the number of females were five-sixths
less than what it is: now neither of these cases is applicable to the
human species, where the number of females generally surpasses that of
males, and where it has never been observed that, even among savages,
the females had, like those of other animals, stated times o