A Discourse Upon the Origin and the Foundation of the Inequality Among Mankind, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Part I.
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The Paradox of the State of Nature
The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have, every one of them, perceived the necessity of tracing it back to a state of nature. But not one of them has ever arrived there. The researches in which remain engaged on this occasion are not to be taken for historical truths but merely as hypothetical and conditional reasonings. We must deny that even before the deluge such a state ever existed among men unless they fell into a paradox very difficult to maintain and altogether impossible to prove.
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