) This
noble savage--quite a contrast to Hobbes's ruffian primeval, "nasty,
brutish," and short-lived--observes and imitates the industry, and
gradually raises himself to the instinct, of the beasts among whom he
lives. His constitution is robust, and almost inaccessible to malady.
He attains to old age, free from gout and rheumatism. He surpasses the
fiercest wild beasts in address as much as they surpass him in
strength, and so arrives to dwell among them without fear. Yet withal
he is distinguished from brutes by freewill and perfectibility,
qualities which gradually draw him out of his primeval condition of
tranquil innocence, lead him through a long course of splendours and
errors, of vices and virtues, and end by making him a tyrant at once
over nature and over himself.
4. Rousseau's life, 1715-1778, was a continual protest against the
formalism, affectation, pedantry and despotism of the age of the
Bourbons. His ideal of man was the unconventional, unconstrained,
solitary, but harmless and easy-going savage. Hobbes was the growth of
a sterner and more serious age. The only reality to him in heaven and
on earth was force: his one idea in philosophy was coercion.
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