style="font-size:15px;"> It is in this respect that my subject is related to the liberal arts. But let us examine for a moment the process that leads to this affinity.
When industry or power have produced in societies inequalities in skills and resources, then disparities arise in the ownership of the countryside, which should belong to everyone. Powerful and rich lords, who own large portions of the common heritage, derive a double advantage from their possessions: luxury and leisure. Yet while profiting from these benefits, they do not completely abandon the impulses that had produced them; indeed, those impulses fill their leisure time. Thus hunting sometimes appeals to belligerent peoples who, in times of peace, find it an enjoyable substitute for war. But aggressive activities do not lead to the transformation of wilderness into farmland or of the countryside into gardens. Such interests are primarily reserved for the farmers who cultivate the land. Open to new ideas, engaged by their work, prompted by their very activities toward the need for relaxation, everything draws them to the pleasures of repose, to the charms of idle enjoyments, and finally to more refined gratifications.
We shall see how, in large and flourishing societies, imitation and vanity are added to these impulses. But let us pursue our argument.
Having become less active because need—both useful and dire to men—no longer determines their behavior, landowners who enjoy in peace both luxury and leisure bring closer to their homes what they had earlier sought far away. Forest shade seems now too distant, and water flowing in out-of-the-way caves is now too hard to draw at its source; in other words, they require that the ready availability of goods obviate need, and the immediacy of gratification anticipate desire.
And so, frustrated in his idleness, man demands that surrounding objects stir feelings in him too often absent from his empty and weary soul. And as his soul has become difficult to please in the choice of sensations, like a sick person in the choice of foods offered him, he carries his desires to the level of sensual experience, whose delicacy requires the most perfect balance of external objects, the senses, and state of mind.
In order to attain such a refined degree of pleasure, man makes subtle distinctions in the embellishment of those sites he enjoys visiting. He prepares comfortable resting places and seeks out attractive views. He demands an ever thicker shade from the foliage of trees intertwined and transformed into bowers, while he requires that apart from their usefulness these trees be also prized for their shapes, their selection, and their variety. Wishing to be constantly enthralled, he gathers in a single place the flowers that had captured his attention in the fields and meadows where nature sows them at random. Moreover, he devises new ways of endowing them with perfections that nature had apparently denied them. Then, attentive to the sweet emotions of love, filial tenderness, and friendship, man discovers in these feelings even greater charms. He abandons himself to them in solitary places where his sensibilities are intensified by the happiness of birds; where the rhythmic sound of cascading, rolling water prolongs a pleasing reverie; where greenery and rare, many-colored flowers invite the eye to linger, thus delighting both sight and smell without bringing too much discomfort to the soul.
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