will regard one's craving
for method in talking about men as a foible of pedantry, we may briefly
remark on one or two detached objections to Rousseau's story. To begin
with, there is no certainty as to there having ever been a state of
nature of a normal and organic kind, any more than there is any one
normal and typical state of society now. There are infinitely diverse
states of society, and there were probably as many diverse states of
nature. Rousseau was sufficiently acquainted with the most recent
metaphysics of his time to know that you cannot think of a tree in
general, nor of a triangle in general, but only of some particular tree
or triangle.[189] In a similar way he might have known that there never
was any such thing as a state of nature in the general and abstract,
fixed, typical, and single. He speaks of the savage state also, which
comes next, as one, identical, normal. It is, of course, nothing of the
kind. The varieties of belief and habit and custom among the different
tribes of savages, in reference to every object that can engage their
attention, from death and the gods and immortality down to the uses of
marriage and the art of counting and the ways of procuring subsistence,
are infinitely numerous; and the more we know about this vast diversity,
the less easy is it to think of the savage state in general. When
Rousseau extols the savage state as the veritable youth of the world, we
wonder whether we are to think of the negroes of the Gold Coast, or the
Dyaks of Borneo, Papuans or Maoris, Cheyennes or Tierra-del-Fuegians or
the fabled Troglodytes; whether in the veritable youth of the world they
counted up to five or only to two; whether they used a fire-drill, and
if so what kind of drill; whether they had the notion of personal
identity in so weak a shape as to practise the couvade; and a hundred
other points, which we should now require any writer to settle, who
should speak of the savage state as sovereign, one, and indivisible, in
the way in which Rousseau speaks of it, and holds it up to our vain
admiration.

Again, if the savage state supervened upon the state of nature in
consequence of certain climatic accidents of a permanent kind, such as
living on the banks of a river or in a dense forest, how was it that the
force of these accidents did not begin to operate at once? How could the
isolated state of nature endure for a year in face of them? Or what was
the precipitating incident which su