Many of Rousseau's notes are too long to reproduce in their entirety, but read these excerpts (page references to our edition):

"Men are wicked; melancholy and constant experience removes any need for proof. Yet man is naturally good; I believe I have demonstrated it. What then can have corrupted him to this point, if not the changes that have come about in his constitution, the progress he has made, and the knowledge he has acquired?" (147)

"What is the more singular [unusual] is that the less natural and urgent the needs, the more the desires increase, and what is worse, so does the power to satisfy them; so that after a long experience of prosperity, and after having consumed many treasures and distressed many men, my hero will end by cutting every throat until he is the sole master of the universe. Such is the moral portrait, if not of human life, at least of the secret ambitions of the heart of every civilized man" (148-149).

Voltaire could not resist this generalization; he noted in his copy "And still more of every savage, if it were possible." Voltaire got even more personal, adding in a later note, "Unfortunate Jean-Jacques, whose debaucheries are well enough known, poor victim of the pox, do you not know it comes from savages?"

Voltaire recognized how open Rousseau left himself to attack. Make a list of the author's unsupported generalizations about "savages."

Reading the remainder of this note is entertaining; Rousseau catalogs the ills brought about by humans' quest for things that he feels they do not need. As you read, look for the relationship between the note and Rousseau's attack on property as the greatest force dividing humanity into superiors and inferiors.