But for Rousseau there is a more serious, even moral, purpose to self-discovery through the good fortune of loving and being loved. And that is to foster the inner purity of feeling and motivation that belongs to human nature ‘without admixture and without obstacle’. This purity, like the rustic setting of his last Reverie, is naïve and unsophisticated. In cultivating it you uncover and listen to your inner voice, and so are in a position to listen more sensitively to the voice of a loved one (or indeed of nature as a whole).Human beings are, Rousseau thinks, naturally good. Before, that is, they have become slaves to the rivalries, hatreds, and artificial needs that living in organised societies stimulates. In the original ‘state of nature’ they weremore untamed than evil, and more attentive to protecting themselves from harm they could receive than tempted to harm others ... Since they had no kind of commerce among themselves; since they consequently knew neither vanity, nor consideration, nor esteem, nor contempt; ... since they regarded the violences they might suffer as harm easy to redress and not as an insult which must be punished, and since they did not even dream of vengeance, except perhaps mechanically and on the spot, like the dog that bites the stone thrown at him, their disputes would rarely have had bloody consequences...