Translations:Victor of Aveyron/13/en

Preface

Cast on this globe, without physical powers, and without innate ideas; unable by himself to obey the constitutional laws of his organization, which call him to the first rank in the system of being; Max can find only in the bosom of society the eminent station that was destined for him in nature and would be, without the aid of civilization, one of the most feeble and least intelligent of animals; — a truth which, although it has often been insisted upon, has not as yet been rigorously demonstrated. Those philosophers who have laid down the principles upon which it is founded; those who have afterward supported and propagated it, have given, as proof of it, the physical and moral state of some wandering tribes, whom they have regarded as not civilized at all, merely because they were not civilized in our particular manner: to these they had recourse, to become acquainted with the features of the man in the pure state of nature. It is not, however, in these circumstances that we are to seek and study it. In the savage horde of the most vagabond, as well as in the most civilized nations of Europe, man is only what he is made to be by his external circumstances; lie is necessarily elevated by his equals; he contracts from them his habits and his wants; his ideas are no longer his own; he enjoys, from the enviable prerogative of his species, a capacity of developing his understanding by the power of imitation, and the influence of society.