PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 607 
Pacific in 1815-18,' ‘to protest most vigorously against the term savage in its 
application to the South Sea Islanders. I prefer, so far as I can, to connect 
definite ideas to the words which I use. A savage for me is the man who, in the 
absence of fixed abode, agriculture, and domesticanimals, knows no form of 
property but his weapons, with which he maintains himself by the chase. 
Wherever the South Sea Islanders can be accused of corruption of morals, this 
seems to me to bear indication not of savagery but of over-civilisation. The 
various inventions, coinage, writing, and the like, which are appropriate to mark 
off the different degrees of civilisation which the peoples of our continent have 
attained, cease to afford under conditions so different any standard for the 
insular and isolated stock which lives under this happy sky, without yesterday or 
to-morrow, living for the moment, and for pleasure.’ 
Voltatre. 
T must leave out of consideration here the results of these successive pictures 
of the Pre-Social State on the course of Political Philosophy. All I am con- 
cerned to do here is to give reasons why these different conceptions took the 
particular shape that they did, under the several circumstances of the age which 
gave birth to them; and I hope that I have been able to show that one of the 
principal factors which determined their form was the actual state of anthropo- 
logical knowledge in the years which immediately preceded the publication of 
each. 
A good example —if this were the time to develop it fully—is the very 
entertaining controversy between Rousseau and Voltaire over the psychical 
unity and uniformity of Man. What led Voltaire to so totally opposite a 
conception of the state of Nature to that entertained by Rousseau? Partly, 
of course, his own political and philosophic standpoint, with which we are 
not concerned directly here; but partly also the circumstance that in the 
years which immediately preceded his attack upon Rousseau, the learned 
world of Europe—and learned France in particular—had come under the 
influence of a fashion—I might almost call it a craze—of enthusiastic admira- 
tion of China and things Chinese. The Jesuit Missions to China, in particular, 
had been sending home wonderful accounts of the civilisation of the Chinese, and 
fabulous versions of its antiquity; and it was, of course, common knowledge in 
Europe in the eighteenth century that any civilisation which went back into the 
second and third thousand years B.c. must be in respectably close contact with 
the Origin of Man, and therefore might be expected to reflect at close quarters 
the outlines of the original state. To find, therefore, that this immemorial 
civilisation of China had existed apparently unchanged since its first ages, was to 
discover fresh light on the nature of Man and a new glimpse of primitive 
society. By this revelation of China, it is true, the Pharaoh’s heart of the 
ancien régime was hardened in pursuit of what has come down into our 
vocabulary as chinoiserie; and, by a strange irony, one of the acutest 
critics of that régime was furnished from the same source with a fresh 
instrument of proof of the essentially social nature of Man in reply to the 
Nihilism of Rousseau. ‘Do you mean by “primitive man” (sawvages) a 
two-footed animal, walking on its hands too if occasion calls, isolated, wander- 
ing in the forests, pairing at hazard, forgetting the woman with which he 
has mated, knowing neither her offspring nor his parents, living like a beast, only 
without the instinct and the resources of the beasts. You will find it in books 
that this state is the true estate of man, and that we have merely degenerated 
pitiably since we left it. But Ido not think that this solitary life ascribed to 
our forefathers is in human nature at all. If I am not mistaken, we are in the 
first rank of the gregarious animals, much as bees, wasps, and the like. If you 
come across a strayed bee, ought you to infer that this bee is in the state of mere 
nature, and that those which work in association in the hive have degenerated ? 
All men do live in Society: can you infer from that, that there was a time when 
they did not?’ ‘Man in general has always been what he is. That does not 
1 Chamisso, Works, i, 119. 
