and not always to be believed about facts, Diderot was a tremendous
liar.]

The very question asked by the academy suggests the possibility of an
answer unfavorable to civilization, but Rousseau's treatment of it was
such as to form the beginning of an epoch in the history of thought. It
is under the rough coat of the laborer, he says, and not under the
tinsel of the courtier, that strength and vigor of body will be found.
Before art had shaped our manners, they were rustic but natural, and
men's actions freely expressed their feelings. Human nature was no
better, at bottom, than now, but men were safer because they could more
easily read each other's minds, and thus they avoided many vices. The
advance of civilization brings increase of corruption. Constantinople,
where learning was preserved during the dark ages, was full of murder,
debauchery, and crime. Contrast with its inhabitants those primitive
nations which have been kept from the contagion of vain knowledge: the
early Persians, the Germans described by Tacitus, the modern Swiss, the
American Indians, whose simple institutions Montaigne prefers to all the
laws of Plato. These nations know well that in other lands idle men
spend their time in disputing about vice and virtue, but they have
considered the morals of these argumentative persons and have learned to
despise their doctrine.

"Astronomy is born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred,
flattery, and lying; geometry of avarice; physics of a vain curiosity;
all, and morals themselves, of human pride. The arts and sciences,
therefore, owe their birth in our vices; we should have less doubt of
the advantage to be derived from them if they sprang from our virtues."
... "Answer me, illustrious philosophers, you from whom we know why
bodies attract each other in a vacuum; what are the relations of areas