ddenly set them to work, and drew the
primitive men from an isolation so profound that they barely recognised
one another, into that semi-social state in which the family
was founded?

We cannot tell how the state of nature continued to subsist, or, if it
ever subsisted, how and why it ever came to an end, because the agencies
which are alleged to have brought it to an end must have been coeval
with the appearance of man himself. If gods had brought to men seed,
fire, and the mechanical arts, as in one of the Platonic myths,[190] we
could understand that there was a long stage preliminary to these
heavenly gifts. But if the gods had no part nor lot in it, and if the
accidents that slowly led the human creature into union were as old as
that nature, of which indeed they were actually the component elements,
then man must have quitted the state of nature the very day on which he
was born into it. And what can be a more monstrous anachronism than to
turn a flat-headed savage into a clever, self-conscious, argumentative
utilitarian of the eighteenth century; working the social problem out in
his flat head with a keenness, a consistency, a grasp of first
principles, that would have entitled him to a chair in the institute of
moral sciences, and entering the social union with the calm and
reasonable deliberation of a great statesman taking a critical step in
policy? Aristotle was wiser when he fixed upon sociability as an
ultimate quality of human nature, instead of making it, as Rousseau and
so many others have done, the conclusion of an unimpeachable train of
syllogistic reasoning.[191] Morelly even, his own contemporary, and
much less of a sage than Aristotle, was still sage enough to perceive
that this primitive human machine, "though composed of intelligent
parts, generally operates independently of its reason; its deliberations
are forestalled, and only leave it to look on, while sentiment does its
work."[192] It is the more remarkable that Rousseau should have fallen
into this kind of error, as it was one of his distinctions to have
perceived and partially worked out the principle, that men guide their
conduct rather from passion and instinct than from reasoned
enlightenment.[193] The ultimate quality which he named pity is, after
all, the germ of sociability, which is only extended sympathy. But he
did not firmly adhere to this ultimate quality, nor make any effort
consistently to trace out its various products.

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