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p. 89

hatever our moralists say, human understanding owes much to the passions, which, by common consent, also owe much to it. It is by the activity of the passions that our reason improves itself; we seek to know only because we desire to enjoy; and it is impossible to conceive a man who had neither desires nor fears giving himself the trouble of reasoning. The passions, in turn, owe their origin to our needs and their development to our knowledge, for one can desire or fear a thing only if one has an idea of it in the mind unless one is responding to a simple impulsion of nature. The savage man, deprived of any sort of enlightenment, experiences passions only of this last kind; his desires do not go beyond his physical needs ; the only good things he knows in the universe are food, a female and repose, and the only evils he fears are pain and hunger. I say pain and not death, because an animal will never know what death is, knowledge of death and its terrors being one of the first acquisitions which man gains on leaving the animal condition.