others as much as when feeble, there is no excess that he would not be
guilty of. He would make nothing of striking his mother when she
delayed ever so little to give him the breast; he would claw, and
bite, and strangle without remorse the first of his younger brothers,
that ever so accidentally jostled or otherwise disturbed him. But
these are two contradictory suppositions in the state of nature, to be
robust and dependent. Man is weak when dependent, and his own master
before he grows robust. Hobbes did not consider that the same cause,
which hinders savages from making use of their reason, as our
jurisconsults pretend, hinders them at the same time from making an
ill use of their faculties, as he himself pretends; so that we may say
that savages are not bad, precisely because they don't know what it is
to be good; for it is neither the development of the understanding,
nor the curb of the law, but the calmness of their passions and their
ignorance of vice that hinders them from doing ill: _tantus plus in
illis proficit vitiorum ignorantia, quam in his cognito virtutis_.
There is besides another principle that has escaped Hobbes, and which,
having been given to man to moderate, on certain occasions, the blind
and impetuous sallies of self-love, or the desire of self-preservation
previous to the appearance of that passion, allays the ardour, with
which he naturally pursues his private welfare, by an innate
abhorrence to see beings suffer that resemble him. I shall not surely
be contradicted, in granting to man the only natural virtue, which the
most passionate detractor of human virtues could not deny him, I mean
that of pity, a disposition suitable to creatures weak as we are, and
liable to so many evils; a virtue so much the more universal, and
withal useful to man, as it takes place in him of all manner of
reflection; and so natural, that the beasts themselves sometimes give
evident signs of it. Not to speak of the tenderness of mothers for
their young; and of the dangers they face to screen them from danger;