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CHAPTER I

OF THE STATE OF MEN WITHOUT CIVIL SOCIETY

1. THE faculties of human nature may be reduced unto four
kinds; bodily strength, experience, reason, passion. Taking the
beginning of this following doctrine from these, we will declare
in the first place what manner of inclinations men who are en-
dued with these faculties bear towards each other, and whether,
and by what faculty they are born, apt for society, and to pre-
serve themselves against mutual violence; then proceeding, we
will shew what advice was necessary to be taken for this business,
and what are the conditions of society, or of human peace; that
is to say, (changing the words only) what are the fundamental
laws of nature.

2. The greatest part of those men who have written aught
concerning commonwealths, either suppose, or require us, or
beg of us to believe, that man is a creature born fit * for society.

____________________
* Since we now we actually a constituted society among men, and none
living out of it, since we discern all desirous of congress, and mutual
correspondence, it may seem a wonderful kind of stupidity, to lay in the
very threshold of this doctrine, such a stumbling block before the readers,
as to deny man to be born fit for society. Therefore I must more plainly
say, that it is true indeed, that to man, by nature, or as man, that is, as
soon as he is born, solitude is an enemy; for infants have need of others to
help them to live, and those of riper years to help them to live well, where-
fore I deny not that men (even nature compelling) desire to come together.
But civil societies are not mere meetings, but bonds, to the making
whereof, faith and compacts are necessary: the virtue whereof to children,
and fools, and the profit whereof to those who have not yet tasted the
miseries which accompany its defects, is altogether unknown; whence it
happens, that those, because they know not what society is, cannot enter
into it; these, because ignorant of the benefit it brings, care not for it.
Manifest therefore it is, that all men, because they are born in infancy,

-21-

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Publication Information: Book Title: De Cive; Or, the Citizen. Contributors: Thomas Hobbes - author, Sterling P. Lamprecht - editor. Publisher: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Place of Publication: New York. Publication Year: 1949. Page Number: 21.
    
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