protections with which he has surrounded himself. He is not afraid of
the wild beasts around him, for experience has taught him that he is
their master. His health is better than ours, for we live in a time when
excess of idleness in some, excess of toil in others, the heating and
over-abundant diet of the rich, the bad food of the poor, the orgies and
excesses of every kind, the immoderate transport of every passion, the
fatigue and strain of spirit,--when all these things have inflicted more
disorders upon us than the vaunted art of medicine has been able to keep
pace with. Even if the sick savage has only nature to hope from, on the
other hand he has only his own malady to be afraid of. He has no fear of
death, for no animal can know what death is, and the knowledge of death
and its terrors is one of the first of man's terrible acquisitions
after abandoning his animal condition.[181] In other respects, such as
protection against weather, such as habitation, such as food, the
savage's natural power of adaptation, and the fact that his demands are
moderate in proportion to his means of satisfying them, forbid us to
consider him physically unhappy. Let us turn to the intellectual and
moral side.

If you contend that men were miserable, degraded, and outcast during
these primitive centuries because the intelligence was dormant, then do
not forget, first, that you are drawing an indictment against
nature,--no trifling blasphemy in those days--and second, that you are
attributing misery to a free creature with tranquil spirit and healthy
body, and that must surely be a singular abuse of the term. We see
around us scarcely any but people who complain of the burden of their
lives; but who ever heard of a savage in full enjoyment of his liberty
ever dreaming of complaint about his life or of self-destruction?

With reference to virtues and vices in a state of nature, Hobbes is
wrong in declaring that man in this state is vicious, as not knowing
virtue. He is not vicious, for the reason that he does not know what
being good is. It is not development of enlightenment nor the
restrictions of law, but the calm of the passions and ignorance of vice,
which keep them from doing ill. _Tanto plus in illis profitcit vitiorum
ignoratio, quam in his cognitio virtutis._

Besides man has one great natural virtue, that of pity, which precedes
in him the use of reflection, and which indeed he shares with some of
the brutes. Mandeville, w