Climate and food have no effect on the intellectual faculties.

finest organisation, must be, in some respects, superior to the rest. Every man therefore, must feel sensations, and acquire ideas that are incommunicable to his fellows. Now there are no ideas of this kind: whoever has such as are clear, can easily communicate them to others. There are, therefore, no ideas that men, of ordinary organisation cannot attain.

The causes that would operate most efficaciously on minds, would be, without doubt, the differences of climate and food. Now, as I have already said, the gross Englishman who feeds on butter and flesh, and breathes a foggy air, has not certainly less understanding than the lean Spaniard, who lives on garlic and onions, in a very dry atmosphere. Shaw, an English physician, who from the fidelity and accuracy of his observations, as well as from the late date of his travels in Barbary, deserves our confidence, says, when speaking of the Moors. "The small progress this people have made "in the arts and sciences, is not the effect of incapa

city or natural stupidity. The Moors have an acute "understanding, and even genius. If they do not "apply themselves to the study of the sciences, it is be"cause being without motives to emulation, their go"vernment does not leave them either liberty or leisure

Now, the time of the developement of inanimate beings, answers to that of the education of man, which is, perhaps, never the same, because, no two of them, as I have proved in the first section, can receive precisely the same instructions.

VOL. I.

M

"sufficient

Powerful patronage will always produce great talents.

"sufficient to cultivate and improve them. The Moors, "like the greatest part of the Orientals, being born "slaves, are naturally enemies to all labour that does "not directly promote their present and personal in"terest."

It is liberty alone that can kindle among a people the sacred fire of glory and emulation. If there be periods when, like those rare birds brought into a country by a storm of wind, great men appear on a sudden in an empire, this is not to be regarded as the effect of a physical, but of a moral cause. In every government, where talents are rewarded, those rewards, like the teeth of the serpent, planted by Cadmus, will produce men. If Descartes, Corneille, &c. rendered the reign of Lewis XIII. illustrious; Racine, Bayle, &c. that of Lewis XIV. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Fontenelle, &c. that of Lewis XV. it is, because the arts and sciences were under these different reigns, successively protected by Richelieu, Colbert, and the late duke of Orleans the regent. Great men, whatever has been said, belong not to the reign of Augustus or Lewis XIV. but to the reign that protects them.

If any imagine that it is to the first fire of youth, to the freshness of the organs, if I may so say, that we owe the fine compositions of great men; they deceive themselves. Racine was but thirty, when he produced his Alexander, and his Andromache; but he was fifty, when he wrote Athalia, and the latter piece is certainly

not

Genius not affected by our state of health.

not inferior to the former*. It is not, moreover, a slight indisposition, which may occasion a state of health more or less delicate, that can extinguish genius.

We do not enjoy every year the same health; yet the lawyer gains or loses every year nearly the same number of causes; the physician kills or cures nearly the same number of patients; and the man of genius, distracted neither by business nor pleasure, by violent passions nor grievous maladies, produces every year nearly the same number of compositions.

Whatever difference there may be in the diet of nations, or the climate they inhabit; in a word, whatever difference there may be in their temperament, it will not augment or diminish the aptitude

*At the end of a certain number of years, a man is, they say, no longer the same composer. Voltaire at sixty was no longer the Voltaire of thirty. Be it so: yet he was equally sagacious. If two men, without being exactly similar, can run as fast, leap as high, shoot as true, and strike a ball as far, the one as the other, they may, without being precisely the same, have an equal understanding.

The aptitude or disposition for understanding or discernment, as I shall show hereafter, is only an aptitude to discern the resemblance or difference, the agreement or disagreement between different objects. That the diversity of temperaments and climates may occasion a difference in the manners and inclinations of a people; that the savage hunters in woody countries, would be herdsmen in a grazing country, may very well be: but it is not

M 2

that

The understanding is not dependent on the bodily faculties.

that men have to understanding. It is not, therefore, on the strength of the body*, or the juvenility of the organs, or the greater or less perfection of the senses, that the greater or less superiority of the understanding depends. To conclude, that experience demonstrates the truth of this fact, is no great matter; I can

less true, that in every country the inhabitants constantly perceive the same relations between the same objects. So, from the moment that these wandering natives unite into nations, when the marshes are drained, and forests cut down, the diversity of climates has had no sensible influence on their minds; and we therefore find in Sweden and Denmark, as accomplished geometricians, chymists, natural philosophers, moralists, &c. as in Greece or Italy. "The climate of Persia, says Chardin, is the most proper "to promote the vigour both of body and mind." Their climate, however, gives the Persians no more genius than the French.

*If the superiority of the mind be independent of the greater or less vigour of temperaments, and the greater or less acuteness of the senses, where shall we seek the cause of this superiority? In the perfection of the interior organisation I shall be told: but, I answer, if the interior perfection of a clock be shown by the precision with which it marks the hour, in man the perfection of his interior organisation shows itself, in like manner, (at least, so far as regards the understanding) by that of the five senses, to which it owes all its ideas. The perfection of the exterior organisation, supposes, therefore, that of the interior. But to prove that this last sort of perfection can have no influence on the understanding, it will suffice to show, (in conformity to experience) that its superiority is intirely independent of the greater or less perfection of the five senses,

also

Of the different manner of receiving sensations.

also prove, that if this fact exists, it is because it cannot exist otherwise, and also, that it is to a cause hitherto unknown, that we must look for the explanation of the phenomenon of the inequality of understandings.

To confirm the truth of this opinion, I think, that after having demonstrated that in men every thing is sensation, we must conclude, that if they differ among themselves, it constantly proceeds from the different degrees of their sensations only.

CHAP. XIII.

ON THE DIFFERENT MANNER OF RECEIVING

SENSATIONS.

MEN have different tastes: but this difference may be either the effect of habit and education, or of the unequal sensibility of their organisation. If the Negro, for example, feels more pleasure in beholding the sooty complexion of an African beauty, than in the roses and lilies of an European, it is in him the effect of habit. If men, according to the country they inhabit, are more affected with this or that sort of music*, and

*M. Rousseau in his Musical Dictionary, relates a remarkable instance of this kind. There is, says he, among the Swiss a tune M 3 become