Throwing aside, therefore, all those scientific books, which teach us only to see men such as they have made themselves, and contemplating the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I think I can perceive in it two principles prior to reason, one of them deeply interesting us in our own welfare and preservation, and the other exciting a natural repugnance at seeing any other sensible being, and particularly any of our own species, suffer pain or death. It is from the agreement and combination [...] between these two principles, without its being necessary to introduce that of sociability, that all the rules of natural right appear to me to be derived-rules which our reason is afterwards obliged to establish on other foundations [...]. In proceeding thus, we shall not be obliged to make man a philosopher before he is a man.

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