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p. 88

ut while the difficulties which surround all these questions may allow some room for disagreement about this difference between man and beast, there is one further distinguishing characteristic of man which is very specific indeed and about which there can be no dispute, and that is the faculty of self-improvement - a faculty which, with the help of circumstance, progressively develops all our other faculties, and which in man is inherent in the species as much as in the individual. On the other hand an animal at the end of several months is already what it will remain for the rest of its life and its species will still be at the end of a thousand years what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone liable to grow into a dotard? Is it not the case that in doing so he returns to his primitive state, and that whereas the beast, which has acquired nothing and has correspondingly nothing to lose, always retains its instincts, man, losing through old age or through some accident, everything that the faculty of self-improvement has enabled him to acquire, falls lower even than the beast? It would be sad for us to be forced to admit that this distinguishing and almost unlimited faculty of man is the source of all his misfortunes; that it is this faculty which, by the action of time, drags man out of that original condition in which he would pass peaceful and innocent days; that it is this faculty, which, bringing to fruition over the centuries his insights and his errors, his vices and his virtues, makes man in the end a tyrant over himself and over nature . It would be a terrible thing to be obliged to praise as a benefactor he who first suggested to the inhabitants of the shores of the Orinoco the practice of flattening the foreheads of their infants, and so preserving at least a part both of their imbecility and of their original happiness.