ce's miseries. Does perfectibility deprive humanity of an otherwise peaceful, but savage, existence? Is it, Rousseau asks, "the faculty which, over the centuries, causes his enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues to arise, and eventually makes him his own and Nature's tyrant?" (149). Rousseau attempts to show that the development of perfectibility required certain circumstances without which mankind would have remained at the savage level and he then tries to show the circumstances that "have perfected human reason while deteriorating the species" (168).
The development of human understanding owed a great deal to the passions because it was by means of circumstances that excited the passions that human desire to know grew in the first place. "We seek to know only because we desire to enjoy, and it is not possible to conceive why someone without desires or fears would take the trouble of reasoning" (149-50). At first, human desires did not exceed human needs. When the needs were basic (food, procreation, rest) and pain the only evil (men having no understanding of death), then human progre
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